The Unity of Dogmatism and Relativism
If you read the complaints of professors, two common concerns are that today's students are variously unwilling to challenge their own dogmas and that students embrace a sort of all encompassing relativism.
At first glance, these are conflicting statements. Relativism would seem to be the opposite of dogmatism. The one is the refusal to accept any position as absolute, the other the unquestioning embrace of absolute positions.
However, in his "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason," D.C Schindler makes a solid argument that these are two sides of the same misological coin.
To turn to caricatures, what does the far-right fundementalist who believes morality is "given" in the Bible have in common with the radical student who proclaims that all morality is simply human power relations in disguise?
For Schindler, it's misology, the idea that reason and argument cannot be trusted.
Misology is not best expressed in the radical skeptic, who questions the ability of reason to comprehend or explain [I]anything[/I]. For in throwing up their arguments against reason they grant it an explicit sort of authority. Rather, misology is best exhibited in the demotion of reason to a lower sort of "tool," one that must be used with other, higher goals/metrics in mind. The radical skeptic leaves reason alone, abandons it. According to Schindler, the misolog "ruins reason."
If we return to our caricatures we will find that neither seems to fully reject reason. The fundamentalist will make use of modern medical treatments and accept medical explanations, [I]except[/I] where they have decided that dogma must trump reason. Likewise, our radical student might be more than happy to invoke statistics and reasoned argument in positioning their opposition to some right wing effort curb social welfare spending.
Where reason cannot be trusted, where dogma, or rather power relations or pragmatism must reign over it, is determined by needs, desires, aesthetic sentiment, etc. A good argument is good justification for belief/action... except when it isn't, when it can be dismissed on non-rational grounds.In this way, identity, power, etc. can come to trump argument. What decides when reason can be dismissed? In misology, it certainly isn't reason itself.
Schindler contrasts this with a view of the unity of reason. He doesn't mention Leibniz, but the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a good example here. If we think things do not happen for "no reason at all," then, practical epistemic limitations not withstanding, things are unified in reason.
He notes a few common symptoms of the shift away from regard for reason, in the academy in particular:
Pragmatism: This makes reason a tool, and thus something applicable to broken down problems, rather than to the unity of being. What is interesting is how arguments in favor of pragmatism cut against each other. If you look more at the analytic tradition, you will see claims that mathematization and making philosophy conform to the structure of the natural sciences is the height of pragmatism. What was the last major invention continental philosophy was involved in developing? What is more pragmatic than science, which leads to technology? Schindler focuses on the analytical side, but if anything, continental philosophy might invoke pragmatism even more often.
What will settle whose claims to being "more pragmatic" are more convincing? Can it be argument, reasoned disputation? It doesn't seem like it can be if reason is a mere tool for meeting goals, for it will be our goals themselves that seem destined to decide the outcome.
Politicization: the reduction of all topics of debate to power relations. This one is a throwback to the sophists. This seems to get English teachers the worst for some reason.
Abstraction: as in the old sense of the term where Hegel says "gossip is abstract, my philosophy is not." To assume that the most general theories or philosophy are necessarily "more abstract," is to have already abstracted parts of reality from the whole, and decided the part is more fundemental. A focus on the specific over the general is itself the result of abstraction. "Instrumentalization" sort of goes with this tendency and the focus on pragmatism.
Anyhow, I thought it was a neat argument to summarize.
At first glance, these are conflicting statements. Relativism would seem to be the opposite of dogmatism. The one is the refusal to accept any position as absolute, the other the unquestioning embrace of absolute positions.
However, in his "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason," D.C Schindler makes a solid argument that these are two sides of the same misological coin.
To turn to caricatures, what does the far-right fundementalist who believes morality is "given" in the Bible have in common with the radical student who proclaims that all morality is simply human power relations in disguise?
For Schindler, it's misology, the idea that reason and argument cannot be trusted.
Misology is not best expressed in the radical skeptic, who questions the ability of reason to comprehend or explain [I]anything[/I]. For in throwing up their arguments against reason they grant it an explicit sort of authority. Rather, misology is best exhibited in the demotion of reason to a lower sort of "tool," one that must be used with other, higher goals/metrics in mind. The radical skeptic leaves reason alone, abandons it. According to Schindler, the misolog "ruins reason."
If we return to our caricatures we will find that neither seems to fully reject reason. The fundamentalist will make use of modern medical treatments and accept medical explanations, [I]except[/I] where they have decided that dogma must trump reason. Likewise, our radical student might be more than happy to invoke statistics and reasoned argument in positioning their opposition to some right wing effort curb social welfare spending.
Where reason cannot be trusted, where dogma, or rather power relations or pragmatism must reign over it, is determined by needs, desires, aesthetic sentiment, etc. A good argument is good justification for belief/action... except when it isn't, when it can be dismissed on non-rational grounds.In this way, identity, power, etc. can come to trump argument. What decides when reason can be dismissed? In misology, it certainly isn't reason itself.
Schindler contrasts this with a view of the unity of reason. He doesn't mention Leibniz, but the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a good example here. If we think things do not happen for "no reason at all," then, practical epistemic limitations not withstanding, things are unified in reason.
He notes a few common symptoms of the shift away from regard for reason, in the academy in particular:
Pragmatism: This makes reason a tool, and thus something applicable to broken down problems, rather than to the unity of being. What is interesting is how arguments in favor of pragmatism cut against each other. If you look more at the analytic tradition, you will see claims that mathematization and making philosophy conform to the structure of the natural sciences is the height of pragmatism. What was the last major invention continental philosophy was involved in developing? What is more pragmatic than science, which leads to technology? Schindler focuses on the analytical side, but if anything, continental philosophy might invoke pragmatism even more often.
What will settle whose claims to being "more pragmatic" are more convincing? Can it be argument, reasoned disputation? It doesn't seem like it can be if reason is a mere tool for meeting goals, for it will be our goals themselves that seem destined to decide the outcome.
Politicization: the reduction of all topics of debate to power relations. This one is a throwback to the sophists. This seems to get English teachers the worst for some reason.
Abstraction: as in the old sense of the term where Hegel says "gossip is abstract, my philosophy is not." To assume that the most general theories or philosophy are necessarily "more abstract," is to have already abstracted parts of reality from the whole, and decided the part is more fundemental. A focus on the specific over the general is itself the result of abstraction. "Instrumentalization" sort of goes with this tendency and the focus on pragmatism.
Anyhow, I thought it was a neat argument to summarize.
Comments (136)
Good post. I have been discussing a similar matter with @J, who may find this interesting. Schindler is on my list to read.
If we read Socrates in The Republic as saying that reason must be the ruler of the soul, then when someone is deciding when reason can be dismissed, their soul is not being ruled by reason. For Socrates this is tantamount to a tyranny within the soul.
In a consequentialist era the notion that reason is per se authoritative is elusive. On a Platonic metaphysic of participation, acting reasonably flows from the inherent authority (ex-ousia) of reason, just as warmth flows from the inherent heat of the sun. With consequentialist (and sophistical) thinking a strange reversal occurs, where acting reasonably is valued but reason is not; where the warmth is appreciated but not the sun. Viewing reason as inherently instrumental really is a sort of tyrannical move.
Really? D.C. Schindler? I didnt realize you were that conservative.
Another top-rate contribution from Joshs. :roll:
At least this time your ad hominem doesn't have such elaborate wrapping paper.
Quoting Leontiskos
I have an antipathy toward religious philosophy, and others (perhaps yourself?) have an antipathy toward atheistic postmodernism. But, as my posting history will reveal, Im perfectly happy to get into detailed and respectful discussion on such issues. Otoh, a perusal of your comment history shows a tendency to scurry away from contentious debate while heaping insults on the other party. You havent been on this forum for very long. Ive been here for 6 years, and if you wish to read all of my contributions over that period, you will find nothing that compares to the harshness and direct hostility you have demonstrated toward certain posters. What you will mostly find are over-long posts filled with too much information.
Given my debate history with Count Timothy, he is probably familiar enough with my idiosyncrasies to see my short comment as a provocation, to which he might choose to respond with something like What do you mean, decidedly non-conservative writers like Ian McGilchrist and John Vervaeke idolize Schindler. And we could take it from there. Im not sure why youre so threatened by me. Many of us here make blunt comments from time to time, but my goal here isnt to alienate, but to clarify my own stance through back and forth argument with others.
I honestly have no clue who he is outside of having had the book recommended to me. The book doesn't seem particularly conservative so far; the argument about misology would seem to apply anywhere on the political spectrum and the discussion of Plato has a lot in common with Robert Wallace, who I wouldn't think is conservative (who knows, maybe he is?).
But if I'm [I]that[/I] conservative for reading Schindler, I am equally a qualified liberal for having read Honneth, the heir to that great bastion of "Cultural Marxism" ... the Frankfurt School :scream:.
IDK, Honneth didn't strike me as super liberal. I once saw a book I liked by Leon Kass back to back denounced in reviews as the work of an Bush-II-working-with arch-conservative, and the work of "a denizen of liberal post-modern academia blaspheming the Bible" in back to back comments.
Ad hominem "provocation" would be an odd way to initiate such a thing.
I believe that when someone writes a serious and thoughtful OP the initial posts have a particular responsibility to respond in kind if the thread is to succeed. Ad hominem quips intended to provoke are particularly pernicious at the very early stage of a thread. At best they derail.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
To be honest, I had no idea who he was either till you mentioned him, and then I scrambled to find some of his youtube lectures and an article called Perfect Difference: Gender and the Analogy of Being. But he does say that liberalism is the political form of evil, and defends this by arguing that god has already revealed himself in history , so for liberals to deny god is to deny this real history as the foundation of the Good , regardless of their intentions.
It seems to me that equivocating the dogmatic fundamentalist with the radical relativist might be a bit inaccurate. First off, it isn't entirely clear if we are talking about all-encompassing relativism, or
just selective relativism, but I'll assume the latter because of this:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The relativist posits a sort of quasi-reasoning that is consistent in support of their denial of any sort of rigorous, reason-based approach to certain moral questions, whereas the fundamentalist cites a holy book with zero epistemic threshold. The relativist at least makes a practical claim in their denial that could indeed be verified: does morality, in this instance, depend entirely upon circumstance, perspective, culture, etc.? This could perhaps be verified, but the truth of the specific claims in the bible cannot.
You might claim that the relativist is wrong in every single instance in which they invoke this, but it is something that can be proven or disproven by something like this:
For act X, if a law Y prohibiting X exists, does Y exist to mediate human power relations, or does it exist for a fundamentally moral reason?
As an axiom, it demonstrates that the relativist is doing some valid reasoning even when they seemingly abandon it.
The problem of misologic is raised at the center or heart of Plato's Phaedo. Simply put, Socrates wants to provide his friends with arguments to support belief in the immortality of the soul. The arguments fail to accomplish this. Those whose trust in reasoned argument is excessive and unreasonable are shattered. They may become haters of argument because it has failed them.
The cure involves, as the action of the dialogue shows, a shift from logos to mythos. Socrates turns from the problem of sound arguments to the soundness of those who make and judge arguments. Socrates human wisdom, his knowledge of his ignorance, is more than just knowing that he is ignorant. It is knowing how to think and live in ignorance.
:lol:
Quoting Joshs
This is a caricature. Schindler's argument there is two-pronged. The first prong is historical/cultural, and even Nietzsche would agree with it (namely that we cannot pretend to go back to a pre-Christian era). The second prong is that liberalism as Schindler defines it requires a denial of the ontological impact of the Incarnation, and that this is objectively evil (as privation) regardless of any good intentions involved. The second prong requires Christian premises, namely that the Incarnation had an ontological effect, and Schindler is not unclear about this fact.
(Relatedly: no, I don't view you as "a threat".)
In my attempt to make the OP short enough, I may not have explained the phenomena I am getting at. The relativist enters into misogyny when they deny the validity of argument and reason in grounding their opinion. Reduction or elimination vis-á-vis ethics is not necessarily misological, and it's unclear if it can rightly be called relativist either. To say something doesn't really exist, that it is really just some better known thing, is not to say that it is relative.
Someone who says something like, "based on this analysis and these arguments, I think morality reduces to statements of emotion," is not engaged in misology. Misology would enter the picture when the claim is something like "because all debates about morality are actually just power struggles, disputation resolves nothing in ethics. Rather, we must pragmatically pursue what we find good through power, and argument is just a means of shifting power relations." (This is pretty much the position of the Sophists.)
The person who reduces or eliminates ethics isn't really a relativist. They are not saying "what is good depends on power, aesthetic taste, etc." They are making a rationally grounded claim about the content of moral propositions, that statements like "rape is evil," are equivalent with something like "rape is not to my taste and I do not want people to do it for this reason." Good doesn't depend on context in this case, it simply doesn't really exist. But the eliminitivist position is often conflated with the relativist position, particularly because relativists will selectivity employ the language and arguments of the eliminitivist when it fits their needs (misology).
Edit: And note the elimination must narrowly defined what type of "good," turns out to be illusory. If all concepts of "good" turn out to be emotion, then we do end up at misology. For now what makes an argument or any criteria of judgement "good" has had the rug pulled out from under it.
Quoting Leontiskos
I dont necessarily disagree. I should have posted the youtube link right away , since I think it is relevant to the OP that Schindlers arguments are supposed to represent a bulwark against dogmatism, and yet he presumes as fact the appearance of god in the world, and presumes the manner of his appearance. I dont understand how that isnt dogmatic.
Quoting Leontiskos
All post-Hegelian philosophy recognizes the dependence of contemporary thinking on all that came before. But one can show how modern thought arose out of Christianity and the Greeks without assuming a cumulative progress that subsumingly retains the meanings of that history.
I think this is all wrong, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that D. C. Schindler is a giant hypocrite, and you were able to conclusively learn this by scrambling after short YouTube videos. Who cares? What does it have to do with the arguments of the OP? Is this not more ad hominem? The antipathy towards religion on this forum crosses a line at some point, impeding philosophical discourse.
The argument of the OP rests on an analysis of the weaknesses of pragmatism and discourses of power relations. The claim is made that truth is relative on those occasions when it suits the purposes of those in charge, and is absolute on other occasions. Thats a familiar critique. For instance, Todd May writes:
I dont agree with this assessment. i think that cultural history develops, such that a parallel progress can be traced in all domains of creativity, from philosophy and science to the arts and ethics. But this is a progress of construction, of invention rather than revelation. Human ethical knowledge , like knowledge in other fields, is the building and transformation of a niche. Through a pragmatic process of reciprocal interaction ( power relations are in fact shared patterns of valuation) we come to learn how to perceive the world through the eyes of the other more and more effectively.
People don't like being tortured and killed, for example. That's a pretty fair tenet that modern law and decency is hinged upon, surely. Sure there's some who might enjoy it, perhaps mentally or physically ill-equipped in an unfortunate way that thankfully most people are not. What of it?
Sure, if you happen to enjoy something 99% of people do not. That's relativism, I suppose?
There's concepts we refer to as realistic, rational, and feasible that cut out the fat so to speak and place us all on as a better path. Wouldn't you agree, @Count Timothy von Icarus?
Which assessment in particular?
That's not really it; that would be a much more narrow diagnosis. The argument is that the validity or reason and argument is discarded selectively, and that this is a commonality in unquestioned dogmatism and relativism. It doesn't really matter why it is done so; that will take many forms.
Would it be more accurate to call this fallibalism rather than relativism? The possibility, or even inevitably of error or lack of certainty does not mean that epistemic justification is relative.
Pragmatism and politization are simply avenues where rationalization is more prevalent and accepted by others. I think misology can be a rationalization when what is rational rejects the conclusion that you want. But ultimately what is behind it all is that most people want what they want, and are inclined to reject points that deny that what they want is rational or correct.
It seems that until 'dogmatism' and 'relativism' are better defined, the claim reduces to something like, "Dogmatists and relativists are irrational in a similar way." The jumping-off point seems to be undergraduates. I do think this is right, for the inability to challenge or question one's own positions tends to involve a distrust of reason, and the belief that reason cannot suffice to establish firm conclusions also involves a distrust of reason. Yet if we are talking about undergraduate types, then we are from the outset restricting ourselves to an investigation of amateurs. Would the points still apply to well-developed thinkers? At the very least I think the inconsistencies would dissolve as we move away from a consideration of amateurs.
This is certainly true, but lack of reason is not the same thing as disrespect for reason or arguing that it is involved in justification for some claims. See below:
This is sort of missing the point. Many people who agree on the authority of reason re claims and justification act irrationally at times. That isn't misology. The similarity between the dogmatist and the relativist lies in their claims that reason and argument simply cannot apply to/judge their claims. For example, argumentation of evolution is simply irrelevant because it must be decided by faith, or argumentation and justification re moral claims is simply irrelevant/lacks any authority because moral claims are decided by power and argument is only relevant as an exercise of power. What the two share is not general "irrationality," but the claim that rationality has no authority or cannot be trusted.
Many influential thinkers have attacked reason: Martin Luther, Rousseau, Hume, etc. That it seems particularly popular to do so writ large now is the relevance of college classes.
To be clear, its not a lack of reason. Its rationalization. Its about constructing some reason to distrust those that would go against what you want. Using some political examples, the "liberal media". Because the liberal media is liberal, they are LIEberal and thus you cannot trust them. They are against conservatism, and sense they lie, you can't trust them so listen to Fox News.
You can explain to a conservative that buys into this why this is a false narrative. They aren't dumb. They just don't CARE. Conservatism is always correct and good, therefore anything which challenges that must be a trick and bad. Your "Rationality" is merely a liberal disguise to trick me into thinking conservatism is wrong.
Rationalizing people will often say they are being rational. They aren't rejecting rationality in their view. My 'common sense' is more rational than the experts. They are rejecting the source as being incapable of being rational, while holding up those who hold conservative ideology as being 'the real rational people'. Reject the source and the facts, and you can win the argument every time.
In short, it is a rationalizing argument to reject rational arguments, because it preserves the intelligence and 'rationality' of one's own argument. Its evil, yes, but it feels good.
A Catholic intellectual. It seems to me that many of the prominent advocates of Platonism and traditional philosophy generally are Catholic. This is something I wrestle with, as I'm not Catholic, rather more a lapsed Anglican. But the metaphysics of 'the Good' seems to me to imply a real qualitative dimension, a true good or summum bonum. That will fit naturally with belief in God but rather uneasily with cosmopolitan secularism, I would have thought.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I suggest that is because in liberal political theory, the individual conscience is the sole arbiter of value. There is no higher authority in any moral sense. Respect for reason is often associated with the oppressive value structures of colonialism and cultural eurocentrism, deference to 'dead white males'.
Sure, and I was not saying that the common irrationality is unrelated to misology. I should have used the term misology, but I did specifically speak about "distrust of reason." My question was: does this scale up from undergraduates? Or is it only to be found in amateurs? My suspicion is that misology can be found in developed thinkers, but that the rational inconsistency dissolves as we move away from amateurs. If this is right then misology does not necessarily involve the inconsistencies (e.g. trusting medicine, opposing conservatism, etc.).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is their error the same as the undergraduate's error?
---
Incidentally, you may enjoy the essay/chapter from Peter L. P. Simpson, "On Doing Wrong, Modern-Style," found in his book, Vices, Virtues, and Consequences: Essays in Moral and Political Philosophy. It begins with this same illustration of relativism in the classroom, but moves into moral philosophy, including the ancient view of the common ("shared") good that you speak of elsewhere.
Relativism is the term used in the OP as the opposite of an absolute position.
The problem with the term 'fallibilism' is that it is usually defined in terms of epistemology. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were zetetic skeptics. An examination of opinion.
Hmm, I'm wondering who you have in mind here. If we take John Rawls as a paradigm liberal political philosopher, we certainly don't find him making such claims for conscience, as far as I can tell. Also, we shouldn't oppose duties of conscience to Catholic teaching. Looking at my old adult catechism, I find, from the Second Vatican Council, "Every one of us is bound to obey his conscience." Aquinas evidently agreed, writing that a person is obliged to follow their conscience even when, unknown to them, it is quite mistaken -- "to deny one's conscience is to turn one's back, if not consciously on God Himself, at least on moral authenticity," according to the catechism.
The question is then, How is one's conscience formed? And of course the catechetical Catholic answer will be very different from, say, the existentialists. "The sole arbiter of value," even for Sartre, doesn't come from conscience, but rather from a series of choices which then inform conscience. These choices may be arbitrary or absurd, but if so, it isn't conscience which will tell us so. We need reasoned discussion for that. Or perhaps a Catholic would add -- "and appeal to authority."
I think this is partly an accident. There are still a large number of Catholic universities with large philosophy programs, and that's where a lot of this sort of work gets done and where it is more popular/not met with disapproval. So you get a system where Catholics are introduced to it more and where non-Catholics go to Catholic settings to work in the area and become Catholic. Either process tends to make the the area of study more dominated by Catholics. Given trends in Orthodoxy, and podcast guests I've heard, I would imagine we would see a not dissimilar phenomena in Eastern European/Middle Eastern Christian-university scholarship but for the fact that they publish in a plethora of different languages and so end up more divided.
Robert Wallace (at Cornell, a secular land-grant college) hits on some extremely similar themes but doesn't seem to identify with organized religion at all. Indeed, his big point is that organized religion, particularly Christianity tends to make God non-trancendent (pace the Patristics and Medievals).
But he identifies a number of religious thinkers with his conception of the truly transcendent and transcendent love/reason tied to the Good. "Plato, Plotinus, St Paul, St Athanasius, St Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Hegel, Emerson, Whitman, Whitehead, Tillich, Rahner." I would add Merton here, who is probably the biggest English-speaking Catholic intellectual in the past century, and John Paul II, probably the biggest recent Catholic intellectual period (IDK, maybe Edith Stein?)
Some of his key points re Plato and Hegel are quite similar to Schindler it seems though:
But nothing in Schindler's framing really seems to point towards political conservatism or necessarily just Roman Catholicism.
Broadly speaking yes, although each thinker has their own unique attack on reason and it comes into their thought in different ways.
I have seen a lot of very flattering analyses of Hume. I don't think I've ever seen one on his moral philosophy that wasn't highly critical. For example:
Once reason is made "a slave of the passions," it can no longer get round the passions and appetites to decide moral issues. Aristotle's idea of the virtues as a habit or skill that can be trained (to some degree) or educated has the weight of common sense and empirical experience behind it. We might have a talent for some virtues, but we also can build on those talents. But if passion comes first, then the idea of discourse in the "good human life," or "the political ideal," loses purchase on its ability to dictate which virtues we should like to develop.
Nietzsche's attack on reason is different, and leads to different problems. In the final book added to the Gay Science in later additions, he is focused on the tyranny of old ideas on us. The rule of reason becomes a sort of tyranny across his work, and there is a great focus on a sort of freedom that must be sought (within the confines of a sort of classical fatalism).
But how might our freedom be properly expressed and executed? Here is where the "no true Nietzschean," problem springs up, for followers on the left and right are sure that the other's moral standpoints are incompatible with Nietzsche, but seem unable to articulate why in any sort of a systematic manner (e.g. "anti-Semitism isn't Nietzschean because he didn't like it.") The separation of reason from the will, and the adoption of Hume's bundle of drives ("congress of souls" in BG&E) makes it unclear exactly who or what is being freed, and how this avoids being just another sort of tyranny, even if it is a temporary one.
The identity movements of the recent epoch run into similar problems. I recall a textbook on psychology that claimed that a focus on quantitative methodology represented "male dominance," and that the sciences as a whole must be more open to qualitative, "female oriented," methods as an equally valid way of knowing. The problem here is not that a greater focus on qualitative methods might not be warranted, it's the grounding of the argument in identity as opposed to reason. For it seems to imply that if we are men, or if the field is dominated by men, that there is in fact no reason to shift to qualitative methods, because each sex has their preferred methodology grounded solely in identity, making both equally valid.
Rawls might be another example. In grounding social morality in the desired of the abstract "rational agent," debates become interminable. We might try to imagine ourselves "behind the viel of ignorance," but we can't actually place ourselves there. Thus, we all come to it with different desires, and since desires determine justice, we still end up with many "justices." The debate then, becomes unending, since reason is only a tool, and everything must circle back to conflicting desires. Argumentation becomes, at best, a power move to try to corral others' desires to our position.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle didn't think rational inquiry was useful? Is Plato sceptical of the dialectical having any utility? This would seem strange.
Plato (I wouldn't lump Aristotle in here) does seem to imply at times that words deal with the realm of appearances, but he also seems to allow that they can point to, aid in the remembrance of, knowledge (e.g. the Meno teaching scene). A person must be ruled over by the rational part of the soul to leave the cave, but they can also be assisted in leaving if they are willing. Plato never gets around to an inquiry on semiotics, but I would imagine he would agree with something like the early Augustine, where signs are reminders pointing back to our essential connection with the proper subjects of "knowledge."
I would tend to agree with assessments that the divided line is not a demarcation of a dichotomy, opinion lying discrete from knowledge. Being in Plato is a unity. The appearance is still part of the whole; there is a strong non-dualism in Plato brought out in Plotinus, Eckhart, etc. And this is why we are not cut off completely in a world of appearances. Indeed, the appearance/reality distinction has no content if all we ever can experience/intuit/know is appearance. Then appearance is just reality.
The interlude on misology is a warning against abandoning reason when one has discovered that what has seemed to be a good argument turns out to be a bad one. To drive this home, Plato next has Socrates advance three (arguably four) arguments about why the soul is not like a harmony, which are of varying quality.
I don't get how you get a reading out the interlude to the effect of "don't trust reason to much, or be lovers of wisdom, because then you will get let down." It is "if you get let down, don't stop being lovers of reason."
[Quote]
The cure involves, as the action of the dialogue shows, a shift from logos to mythos. Socrates turns from the problem of sound arguments to the soundness of those who make and judge arguments. Socrates human wisdom, his knowledge of his ignorance, is more than just knowing that he is ignorant. It is knowing how to think and live in ignorance.
[/quote]
Plato uses mythos for a number of reasons. At the end of the Republic, it is arguably a nice story for those who failed to grasp the full import of the dialogue. Sometimes he uses it to demonstrate the essentially ecstatic and transcendent nature of reason (the Phaedrus), and sometimes it is as you say, a way around an insoluble problem (the Phaedo).
This move in the Phaedo and other places often is refered to as the "second sailing." Being unable to catch the right "wind" to resolve the appearance/reality distinction and explain the forms, Plato switches to another form of communication. He likens this to how sailors who cannot catch the wind must sometimes pull out the oars.
But Plato seems to catch the wind in The Republic, where this subject is tackled more head on.
To the point, consider the following:
Does Plato think it is impossible to learn of beauty itself or for someone to be led to it?
I'm not a Rawlsian all down the line, but I do think you're being unfair here. The veil of ignorance, or the "original position," is a technical contrivance Rawls uses to set a basis for his very complicated discussion. He's well aware that no one actually starts from there, any more than we formally adopt "the social contract." If you want to read some good objections to the original position from a sympathetic philosopher, read Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice. Her basic criticism is that the conditions Rawls asks us to be ignorant of -- race, class, sex, a particular conception of the good -- may not include some other equally important ones, such as disability or even species.
That was a bit off topic, but my next comment is relevant, I think. You say "debates become interminable" if social morality is based on the prudential desires of abstract rational agents. But one person's "interminable debate" may be another's "ongoing process of communication and refinement of values." It raises the question, Why do we expect rational debate to terminate? Are there in fact instances of this, in philosophy? Might not one of the virtues of rationality be its (perhaps) endless willingness to continue the conversation? When I deny misology and put my trust in reason, I'm also declaring my faith in certain human characteristics and values -- patience, fairness, inclusion, intellectual honesty. Is this model of reason in fact Eurocentric, or patriarchal, or similarly flawed by historicity? That may well be -- but the only way find out is to keep talking about it.
Both terms 'zetetic' and 'skeptic' originally meant inquiry. It is not skepticism in the modern dogmatic sense, which denies the possibility of knowledge, but rather an acknowledgement that one does not possess knowledge. Hence, to proceed by inquiry, which in large part is dialectical, that is, via argument.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Recollection (anamnesis) is a myth. As a reasoned argument it suffers from the problem infinite regress. There must have been some previous life in which one learned what in later lives is recollected. In that case knowledge would not be recollection.
Recollection also plays a part in our life here and now. In the Phaedo Socrates gives the following example:
(73b-d)
There seems to be no distinction here between recollection and being reminded of something. In the example given recollection is independent of stories of death. Simmias must be reminded of the argument that learning is recollection. If he is to learn that learning is recollection he learns it by being reminded of the story, not by recollecting something from a previous life. As he says:
It should not escape notice that he says "undergo". Accepting the story is more like an indoctrination than simply hearing the story.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Reason functions in the same way in the cave:
(Republic 516c-d)
Reason can rule even for us ignorant cave dwellers who are not ruled by the myth of transcendence.
I don't see where I stated otherwise. The point is merely that desire drives the ship. What "would we want?" is the framing, not "what should we want?" The relevance of us being unable to abstract ourselves into identical "rational agents," is its implications when desire is driving the ship, not that this somehow ruins the utility of Rawls' thought experiment, nor that Rawls assumes we can really do this (he doesn't). If we could all actually get "behind the viel," then what would be good would simply be "good" in virtue of the fact that this is what people behind the viel want.
But why does the abstract rational agent want the society they want? If it's because of their reason alone, then reason turns out to actually be behind the preferences, and we have gone back in time to a point where it is possible to articulate through reason the grounds for justice and morality. If this desire is unanalyzable, then the fact that we can't actually get behind the viel is quite a problem, for we cannot come to possess this unanalyzable desire.
This is a fair point. "Interminable," might be the wrong description, although they certainly are interminable. It is more that these debates turn into people talking past one another and splitting off into silos. The defining feature might be politicization, the shift of debate into power struggles, grounded in mutually exclusive presuppositions about the applicability of reason and argument to various subjects of debate.
We should probably start a different thread to pursue this. But I think you're right that the liberal/Kantian ethical position begins by refusing to specify morality ("what should I want?") and instead assumes that a just society will make maximal allowance for many ethical points of view and prudential goals. This, then, at a higher level, is "what I should want" -- a contractarian respect for something that looks like the categorical imperative with a dash of tolerance added. And the (perhaps interminable!) debate is about what that maximal allowance should be. Free speech? Sure. Free speech that directly threatens me with death? Surely not. Free speech that promulgates morally obnoxious points of view, according to me? Not so clear . . . European liberal democracy often says no, US Constitution usually says yes. And the conversation goes on.
Quoting J
Some months ago I was reading Peter L. P. Simpson.* His view is that Rawls' thought leads inevitably to cultural relativism, and that when this charge was brought against Rawls (by Hare), Rawls simply claimed that none of his work was ever intended to overcome cultural relativism. Simpson holds that it is quite possible to read Rawls' early work in this way, but that it was interpreted and received as being intended (or at least capable) of overcoming cultural relativism. Such an interpretation remains to this day.
For Simpson the proximate problem was not the desires of the "rational agent" (this was an ongoing problem beginning as early as Machiavelli, which Rawls inherited). The problem is that Rawls' starting point is intuition, and the intuitions with which he begins happen to be cultural intuitions. So for a culture which adheres to the intuitions that Rawls develops, his moral system is appealing, but because Rawls' approach is not aimed at universality, many cultures do not so adhere.
* See, for example, "A Century of Anglo-American Moral Theory," by Peter L. P. Simpson
I'll back up @Wayfarer on this. It's no accident that Catholic universities tend to have large philosophy programs, nor that these philosophy programs tend to be Platonic or Aristotelian in nature. Indeed, Catholic clergy are required to have what is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and this education leans into Platonism and Aristotelianism. You won't find this at all in Protestantism. Orthodox are warmer towards philosophy than Protestants, but they don't come near Catholics. There was a point in the Medieval period when the Orthodox Church turned a corner, rejecting Barlaam and opting for Palamas, and that decision cemented a distrust in philosophy and eclecticism. For my money the two most philosophically robust religions are Catholicism and Hinduism.
---
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Okay, this makes good sense to me.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. Still, I would maintain that Hume and Nietzsche are more consistent than the undergraduate, and therefore the misology problem and the consistency problem come apart.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As noted above, I think Rawlsianism only works if Rawls' cultural intuitions are granted as premises. So I wouldn't lump him into the same camp as Nietzsche. Hume could arguably fall into this Rawlsian mold. I think Hume has more respect for cultural intuitions than is sometimes recognized.
How can you tell if it's dogmatic or not? It's a brief conversation that is starting "in the middle." Does he "presuppose" the appearance of God in the world as an absolute or does he think that there is reasonable evidence for it? Certainly we can start out in the "middle" and say "flat-Earthers are ridiculous because they ignore all the evidence that the Earth is round," without having our assertion that the Earth is round rest on unquestioned dogma.
Bad argument and bad judgement isn't dogma. When it comes to religion, I find there is a bad tendency to presume dogmatism simply because religious belief often is dogmatic. But consider the case where I am convinced in the reality of the Incarnation for this reason:
Each night for a month, an angle came to me and took me on a tour of the heavens, and I was as awake and aware as I saw the wonders there as I ever am in my everyday life.
Further, my wife, and some reputable friends I had over heard me talking in my sleep and claim on their lives that they saw me glowing and levitating of the bed. Additionally, the angle who proclaimed God's revelation to me told me about the future, which I wrote down, and all that was said came to pass.
I would argue that doubt in this case would be more the dogmatic position. For it would be saying that seemingly no amount of evidence can shake me from my preexisting conviction that the Incarnation did not occur. But this is precisely what makes the epistemology of religion such a dicey business, for my justification is difficult to share, although this doesn't make it fail to be good justification.
Well, Hume and Nietzsche would be forerunners of the attack on reason. Schindler's argument, which seems credible, is that this has expanded from individual thinkers and lines of critique to whole areas of discourse where reason is secondary.
I did find the image I was thinking of:
Some of the bullets, particularly the last, would seem to make identity trump reason. Of course, there is also a difference between "all past discourse and attempts to produce rational evidence is corrupted by power relations, identity, etc." and "reason cannot adjudicate these issues, even in an ideal setting." Yet it's easy to see how one bleeds into the other, or how the former, if it makes the conditions where reason is valid utopian and forever out of reach, essentially becomes the latter for all practical purposes.
Agree 100%. I meant more that it's an accident that similar lines aren't popular in other places, that it doesn't seem like a necessarily Catholic set of ideas. But I agree that historically it has an extremely close relationship.
I don't think Popper even believed that. A criteria like "objectively measurable, verifiably repeatable evidence, that [is] capable of being falsified," would make it impossible to believe in historical events without being a dogmatist. How many times was the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson and who was measuring him?
And I especially don't think you think that's a good way to define dogmatism, nor do I, nor do I think Schindler would either.
What I'm referring to is the centrality of individualism to liberalism and modernity, and the individual as the sole arbiter of value in Enlightenment philosophy. I would have thought that an uncontroversial claim. The underlying point is that with the rejection of the transcendent, we are inhabitants of Max Weber's 'disenchanted world'.
[quote=David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist;https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist]In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as causes, but which are nothing like the uniform material causes of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of natures deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the veil of Isis and ever deeper into natures inner mysteries.
The Cartesian picture, by contrast, was a chimera, an ungainly and extrinsic alliance of antinomies. And reason abhors a dualism. Moreover, the sciences in their modern form aspire to universal explanation, ideally by way of the most comprehensive and parsimonious principles possible. So it was inevitable that what began as an imperfect method for studying concrete particulars would soon metastasize into a metaphysics of the whole of reality. The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order.[/quote]
Quoting J
Isn't the Christian doctrine that 'Our conscience is a part of our God-given internal faculties, a critical inner awareness that bears witness to the norms and values we recognize'? I can see a line from Aristotle's 'nous' and Augustine's doctrine of 'divine illumination' to that conception. The point being, again, that severing the link between individual conscience and the larger sense of reason as an animating factor of the universe leaves the individual marooned in a meaningless universe, a stranger in a strange land.
Quoting Leontiskos
'Don't mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.' ~ Basil Fawlty, Fawlty Towers, Series 1, Episode 6, 'The Germans'.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My view is that Aquinas also is an exponent of the philosophia perennis, that he preserved and carried forward the insights of Platonist philosophy, integrated with Christian theology. The decline of scholastic realism and the ascendancy of nominalism and theological voluntarism was a major watershed in the history of ideas in Western culture.
All of those names you mention are arguably part of that broader stream, Thomas Merton in particular, as an early inter-faith pioneer.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I encountered Robert Wallace through a back-page OP in Philosophy Now, Hegel's God. I found it quite congenial, but then, he's tending towards mystical interpretation of Hegel and the 'philosophia perennis', which is basically my home turf.
[quote=Robert Wallace] It seems to me that a major part of whats going on in the world of religion and spirituality, in our time, is a sorting out of the issue of what is genuinely transcendent. Much conventional religion seems to be stuck in the habit of conceiving of God as a separate being, despite the fact that when its carefully examined, such a being would be finite and thus wouldnt really transcend the world at all.[/quote]
Vitally important point. That is the same issue behind John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. That Western culture has thrown the baby of spiritual awakening out with the bathwater of ecclesiastical dogmatism.
BTW, the only thing I thought was unfair about Count T's reference to Rawls was this: "We might try to imagine ourselves 'behind the veil of ignorance,' but we can't actually place ourselves there." I took this to mean that the thought experiment couldn't succeed, because we can't actually become ignorant in the right ways, and that Rawls was somehow overlooking this. But this may not have been Count T's meaning.
I'd say this is actually the claim that any non-Scientistic methodology is dogmatism, which is a remarkable claim. Ironically, these varieties of Scientism are very often themselves forms of dogmatism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Me neither.
(@Wayfarer)
OK, the world may be "disenchanted" in Weber's sense, but surely "the individual as the sole arbiter of value" isn't the only remaining alternative. Isn't there an vigorous, important strain of thought in the West that tries to find meaning and value in various forms of community, intersubjectivity, etc.? I'd argue that, in fact, this is the basis of scientific method and of Deweyan pragmatism; no single individual can assert what is valuable or not; reasoned, fallible consensus is required.
Oh, there are plenty of other ways of determining what is the case besides using Poppers method. Im not a Popperian, Im a Kuhnian, so I dont think science itself should proceed by the method of falsification. But perhaps you can explain to me what kind of non-dogmatic method of truth-making allows Schindler to assert that liberal politics is evil because it doesnt accept the truth of the resurrection.
Okay.
Quoting J
This is a salutary correction. I was glossing Simpson, and would probably need to go back for a tighter critique, but I can't remember all of the sources. For Simpson Rawls' intuitions are related to modern liberal democracies, and systems derived from Rawls tend to be unable to adjudicate disputes involving cultures which do not adhere to those (cultural) intuitions. Simpson sees Aristotle, in his Politics, doing for a variety of regimes what Rawls did for modern democracy. The crucial difference is that after showing how to optimize (or corrupt) each kind of regime, Aristotle argues for a particular ranking of the various regimes. It is this final step that is required for a universal morality or political philosophy, and it is what Rawls never attempted.
Quoting J
Fair enough. :up:
Conscience is a notoriously ambiguous term, and there are different conceptions of conscience even within Christianity.
But to your point, today we are seeing a constriction of the idea of conscience due to the conditioning from individualism, such that "conscience rights" are potentially thought to exist independent of any appeal to religion, tradition, or reason. I think Catholics would see that as a corruption. ...But none of this adjudicates your difference with @J.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Whats missing here is definition. What do angel and heaven mean? Its not a question of these concepts being wrong but of being so vaguely defined that they dont give a basis for measurement, for agreement or disagreement. The question isnt whether something happened, but what exactly it was, whether it can be repeated and predicted within some scheme of causality. Dogmatism is associated with an unwillingness to expose an experience to all possible forms of questioning. In Schindlers paper on gender, he disagrees with gender theorists on the relation between difference and identity.
He wants to place differences within categories which unify from above, as the general ruling over the particular.
This transcendence of the general can be considered as a form of dogmatism, a flattening and totalizing of contextual variation that the later Wittgenstein saw as the central confusion of philosophy.
Well, yeah, but my intuition is, that there's still something missing. Hence that link I threw in at the last minute - it was an OP on the dialogue between then Cardinal Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, at the time when the Habermas sought to re-engage in the dialogue between religious and secular philosophy.
There are resonances with another philosopher of similar ilk, Theodor Adorno:
[quote=IEP;https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/#H4]Adornos moral philosophy is similarly concerned with the effects of enlightenment upon both the prospects of individuals leading a morally good life and philosophers ability to identify what such a life may consist of. Adorno argues that the instrumentalization of reason has fundamentally undermined both. He argues that social life in modern societies no longer coheres around a set of widely espoused moral truths and that modern societies lack a moral basis. What has replaced morality as the integrating cement of social life are instrumental reasoning and the exposure of everyone to the capitalist market. According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic, in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism. Within a nihilistic world, moral beliefs and moral reasoning are held to have no ultimately rational authority: moral claims are conceived of as, at best, inherently subjective statements, expressing not an objective property of the world, but the individuals own prejudices. Morality is presented as thereby lacking any objective, public basis. The espousal of specific moral beliefs is thus understood as an instrument for the assertion of ones own, partial interests: morality has been subsumed by instrumental reasoning. Adorno attempts to critically analyse this condition. He is not a nihilist, but a critic of nihilism.[/quote]
Quoting J
Inter-subjective agreement is essential when it comes to scientific hypotheses, but it's not realistic when it comes to one's own existence, unless you're part of a collective. So, paradoxically, in response to that, I will say that the individual conscience is supreme, that there are situations where you and you alone are required to make a call based on nothing other than your convictions. Sure, you might get it wrong, but that is part of the deal. Maybe that's why faith is required.
Okay.
Quoting Joshs
From earlier:
Quoting Leontiskos
For someone who believes that the Incarnation occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Incarnation is evil.* Similarly, for someone who believes that the Holocaust occurred and changed reality, a political philosophy which requires neutrality on the truth-value of the Holocaust is evil. Germany goes a step further and basically requires non-neutrality, prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust.
But I think did a good job underlining the problems with your understanding of "dogmatism."
* Note that Schindler specifically says that he is speaking of evil as privation, not as intentional moral evil.
Habermas is exactly who I was thinking of as an exponent of this ongoing, rational, consensus-driven approach to knowledge and values!
Quoting Wayfarer
This is complicated, but I understand what you mean. We don't want our values determined for us by consensus. But the alternative of stubbornly asserting one's own right to decide what matters based on nothing other than personal choice is surely a version of the inimical individualism you've been writing about. As usual, we're looking for reasonable middle grounds for compromise . . .
I think that's fair, so long as we are open to the various additional factors that exercise an influence.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, you're preaching to the choir. :smile:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, I don't think it's Catholic per se. I think it's important to be able to read a Catholic's book on Plato without reading all sorts of religious influences into the text. The emphasis on "power relations" has become so strong that many find it difficult to concentrate on or address an idea without constantly adverting to the religion of the person who thought it. This is related to your newer thread, where you make the point that reason must be allowed to transcend its conditions and environment, having authority in itself. Viz:
Quoting Leontiskos
A Brave New World world might be a good inroad for the problem I see with Rawls. It's a society that does extremely well at fulfilling everyone's appetitive desires and passions. It maximizes utility as well as might be possible without hooking everyone up to some sort of chemical pleasure creche. Each class thinks their role is best. It has a very equal distribution of goods.
It has a high degree of freedom as defined in the Lockean/liberal "freedom as freedom from external constraint," sense. You can do as you desire. If you're a rare person who doesn't desire just orgy porgy, mass media entertainment, and soma binges, you can go off to an island of other misfits and pursue your scientific or artistic projects; your own Gault's Gulch. You're free so long as you don't mess with the system that makes most other people happy. It's the minimal amount of external constraint to maximize utility for all; the liberal ideal!
But the world is a horrific dystopia. How does our abstract observer express this without having to get into how a good human life "ought" to be? They can't complain about freedom to fulfill desires, utility, or equality. What makes ABNW a dystopia is all about what we ought to desire, not what we might come to/do desire.
To get at why the world of ABNW is bad though, it seems we have to go beyond and behind the preferences of the agent. Something like Hegel's "people must be forced to be free," and "the criminal deserves the right to be punished" because they aren't a dog to be trained.
A middle way, perhaps. At issue, though, is the substance of wisdom, of what wisdom constitutes, how to discern it. I contend that post-Enlightenment philosophies tend, on the whole, to occlude that question, often because of their antagonism to religious ideas, which has already been noted several times in this thread. Not that I'm evangalising any particular religion in saying that. But I think classical philosophy has a religious side - where it differs from religion per se, is the insistence on subjecting religious ideas to reason. But pre-modern philosophy generally was open to the religious, it was a part of their Weltanschauung in a way it can't be for us.
The issue is that the definition of reason itself, per Adorno and Habermas, has changed in post-Enlightenment philosophy. To throw that into relief, consider the mainstream consensus of the essentially meaningless nature of the Universe. On the one hand, from a purely scientific point of view, it makes complete sense, as we're looking at it from a completely objective point of view. Science consciously excludes anything subjective in its reckonings. But when this becomes a belief about the 'the way things really are' that it opens up the chasm of nihislim. Because we don't actually live in the scientific universe, we dwell in the human condition. In the absence of a sense of the sacred, there is no pole star towards which we orient ourselves. Hence, again, awakening from the meaning crisis.
Quoting Leontiskos
The reason that anything appears reasonable is precisely because of the way that actual conditions, context and enviroment intertwine with background history to redefine what is at stake and at issue in the determination of the goals of reason. Trying to separate reason from the real contexts of its instantiation is a recipe for dogmatism. Understanding is enacted in pragmatic interactions, not transported from a transcendent authoritative realm to grace the present from the past. Were not trying to enshrine eternal verities , but adapt to continually changing conditions by extracting from them anticipatable regularities.
A few weeks ago on a road trip I listened to a conversation between Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke, originally given a much better title, "The Rebirth of the Sacred." I thought it was interesting, and I was actually impressed with Vervaeke. (Peterson is a bit exasperating in that interview - I wish he had handed the reins to Vervaeke.)
In that same interview Peterson talks about a book he is working on, which looks to be a psychological version of Peter Simpson's Political Illiberalism. From my understanding it is a critique of the liberal Enlightenment view which undergirds the idea that the individual can be morally or religiously neutral, as if one could approach such questions of value from a purely objective vantage point. I don't see that critique as controversial, but I am glad to see it being popularized.
I've just noticed that, re-reading the thread. I've been pondering this question, in respect of my readings of classical philosophy and the reverence for reason, modulated by Kant.
My tentative conclusion is that reason is not in principle 'ek-static' in the sense indicated in this quotation. I think that 'reason points beyond itself' - as Kant says, it has an ineluctable tendency to ask questions that it can't answer (hence the antinomies of reason.) Reason is not the be-all and end-all. In neo-Platonism, the 'unitive vision' is described thus:
[quote=Class Notes on Plotinus]For Plotinus, man "is in some sense divine, and the object of the philosophic life is to understand this divinity and restore its proper relationship with the divine All and, in that All, to come to union with its transcendent source, the One or Good" (Cambridge, 222). Plotinus's philosophy is difficult to elucidate, precisely because what it seeks to elucidate is a manner of thinking that precedes what one terms discursive thought. Discursive thought is the sort of thinking we do most often in a philosophical discussion or debate, when we seek to follow a series of premises and intermediate conclusions to a final conclusion. In such a thinking, our minds move from one point to the next, as if each point only can be true after we have known the truth of the point preceding it. The final point is true, only because we have already built up one by one a series of points preceding it logically that are also true. In the same way, the meaning of the sentence I am now speaking only builds itself up by the addition of each word, until coming to its conclusion it makes a certain sense built of the words from which it is constituted. Because discurive thinking is within ordinary time, it is not capable of thinking all its points or saying all its words in the very same moment.
But Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal. To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together.[/quote]
Hence, reason 'pointing beyond itself', to the 'trans-rational' (which is, importantly, not simply irrational.) This is the basis of the frequent comparisons of Plotinus with e.g. Shankara and non-dualism. But all of that tends to be rejected under the catch-all of 'it's religion'.
The world exists in a precarious balance of the coincidentia oppositorum. Environment conditions reason and reason shapes environment. To reject either is folly. And yet there comes a point when we must make a choice as to the hierarchy offrom a Platonic perspectivethe various parts of the soul. This choice shapes us, and "immanentists" who favor environment and conditioning become immanent, ingrained into their environment and disagreeable to transcendence; while ""transcendentalists"" who hold fast to the idea that there is a part of the soul which transcends environment and conditioning end up transcending and transforming their environment. An immanentist balks at the OP not only because it is based on the work of a Catholic, but also because in bypassing pragmatism and relativism it stretches up towards the transcendent, thereby "making all things new."
On a scientifically informed perspective, it would be naive to think that we're looking at anything from a completely objective point of view.
We are creatures that find things meaningful. Looking for meaning, beyond actually finding things meaningful in this life, might be a fool's errand.
Quoting Wayfarer
That is clearly one of your favorite things to say. But it's simply not true. It strongly suggests you are ignorant of a whole lot of scientific thought.
Quoting Wayfarer
Your bogeyman.
Quoting Wayfarer
False dichotomy.
This begs the question as to just what reason is or what it consists in. Do not those dogmatists and relativists give reasons for their stances? Surely the radical skeptics also have their reasons for being skeptical.
I won't belabor this, but I don't believe he has. The left has a consistent difficulty in distinguishing someone who doesn't oppose Trump from someone who endorses Trump. They assume that everyone who hasn't opposed Trump therefore endorses him. From what I have seen Peterson hasn't opposed Trump in this upcoming election, but neither has he endorsed him.
Well, if they are skeptical regarding reason itself, as a whole, they might have their reasons, but they certainly shouldn't put any stock in them. :rofl:
Phyrro of Elis allegedly had to have his disciples follow him around to make sure he didn't walk of cliffs or into fire, so strong was his conviction in the unreliability of reason. But alas, he was one day caught running away from a wild dog and was disgraced.
The story about Pyrrho could well be apocryphal, and since he wrote nothing himself, what we today consider to be Pyrrhonism comes from later sources, one of the most notable being Sextus Empiricus.
This is from Wikipedia:
[i]A summary of Pyrrho's philosophy was preserved by Eusebius, quoting Aristocles, quoting Timon, in what is known as the "Aristocles passage."[5] There are conflicting interpretations of the ideas presented in this passage, each of which leads to a different conclusion as to what Pyrrho meant:
'The things themselves are equally indifferent, and unstable, and indeterminate, and therefore neither our senses nor our opinions are either true or false. For this reason then we must not trust them, but be without opinions, and without bias, and without wavering, saying of every single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.[12][/i](Underlining mine).
In any case you failed to address the salient question: what do you think reason consists in?
The point I'm trying to make about the transition to modernity, is the general rejection of there being reason in any sense aside from it being an evolved human capacity. Historically, this is because of the way that Platonism had become absorbed into Christian theology (in the form of Christian Platonism), which meams that it has largely been rejected by, or is as seen as in conflict with, naturalism (the 'conflict thesis'). And naturalism presumes no such cosmic reason or 'logos'. This is where the 'all-encompassing relativism' that the OP mentions comes from.
Why do you think we should regard the cosmos as knowable, let alone rational in any sense?
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't know how anyone can determine whether the universe exhibits chaos or order. How does one do this except by using a human made criteria?
I'm intrigued that you are willing to accept the rather infamous 'blind spot in science' - the role of the observer as foundational in constructing reality - yet simultaneously regard the idea that order and reason (which we apprehend because we observe or infer them) transcend our observational constructivism. Which aspect of being an observer allows us to see the world and the order or reason in it objectively?
That would seem to place Peterson to the right of American conservatives like George Will, David Brooks, David Frum and Ross Douthat, and venerable Republican fixtures like National Review, all of who unequivocally oppose Trump. That doesnt jibe with my assessment of Petersons political views. Im assuming his non-opposition is a business move, to avoid alienating some of his fan base.
1) Yes, Rawls is offering a theory of political virtue, not individual morality. Hes not agnostic or skeptical about morality, as one person or another may conceive it; he himself was surely a hard-core Kantian. What he argues for is a hands-off approach by liberal governments when it comes to what is sometimes called legislating morality. He assumes both pluralism and tolerance. Messing with the system that makes most other people happy, to use your phrase, would presumably involve active restraints or disincentives on certain behaviors, as government policy. And Rawlsian liberals believe this is not the right approach, that tolerance of stupidity and wickedness is, in the end, the lesser of two evils. I emphasize again that this whole theory applies to social structures, not individuals. Personally I despise all forms of bigoted rhetoric, for instance, and do everything I can to oppose it; Im not the least bit personally tolerant in this area. But I dont want my government to censor or ban it. Im also against a life of selfish pleasure, but liberalism asks me to tolerate in my role as citizen your choice of lifestyle even though I disapprove.
2) I think Rawls had much higher hopes for a society that implemented his theory of justice higher, that is, than a sort of pleasure-based accommodation of desires. It isnt only personal desires that thrive in a liberal democracy. So too do ideas, values, commitments, imagination, and deeply experienced projects of all kinds. And so does impassioned disagreement. Rawls believed we would become better people in a just society, not all at once, but as a result of participating in a fair political process. And his vision of better is surely not a matter of binges and entertainment. I guess another way of saying it is: Rawlsian liberal democracy is our best shot at creating a society that allows you or me the unfettered opportunity to argue for our personal morality, and perhaps see those arguments prevail.
That's a resounding note to end on, but I'm impelled to add: Rawls did not pay nearly enough attention to systemic economic inequality and its effect on fairness.
There are similar arguments against systems being complex versus simple. But once you start deciding that key ways we cognize the world are illusory, it seems hard to know where to stop. In virtue of what is it appropriate to say that "my car is blue," when nothing looks blue without eyes? Could we also say color is a "human made" criteria? Or in virtue of what is "my car has more mass than the this bag of flour," free from being a human-made distinction? Sans the observer, there is no one to cut "my car" and "the bag of flour," into discrete physical systems.
The ability to quantize features has been a deciding factor here. Mass is [I]real[/I] because it can be quantized. Likewise, color is illusory, while light really does have a wavelength, because the wavelength can be quantized. Except we can now quantize all the discernable colors the human eye can see, so this no longer seems like a good delineation.
Two things seem to be going on here. The allure of mathematization, and then the pairing down of the world to its features that appear to us through multiple senses. The reduction of all things to "bodies in space," popular since the dawn of philosophy, would seem to come from the fact that sight, hearing, touch, and the vestibular sense all can cross-check each other in verifying objects' position in space and their shape. But there is no prima facie reason why, if we distrust our senses re color or pitch, that we should necessarily think they give us a more accurate picture of the world when they agree.
But of course, there have been attempts to mathematize complexity, order, etc. It's just that it isn't easy, and there are multiple models for varying use cases. If there was a canonical mathematization of "what physical order is," would that settle the issue? Entropy is another area where subjectivity seems to get involved (Jaynes), yet this also lies at the foundations of physics.
Humans themselves are not "human made." Given a naturalist explanation of how humans come to have their cognitive capabilities, it seems odd to me how often it is proposed that there are totally sui generis, uniquely human things we are said to "project" on to reality. From whence do these illusions come? I think there is a deep, unsettled conflict between humanism and naturalism in modern philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the inability to move past the appearance/reality dichotomy.
Humanism wants man as the measure of all things, and proclaims our freedom when it proclaims that ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and even the objects of sense perception are our own invention. And yet naturalism would say these all have a causal history, having come into being through the same step-wise progression of physical state evolution (the logic of the world) that moves planets and dust particles. The result is a sort of bipolar view where scientific naturalism is held up as the paradigm of knowledge, but then it's objects are taken to be mere appearance. So to this point:
If everything known or experienced is appearance, why even posit an appearance/reality distinction? If the reality can't be known, then it's just an unsupportable posit, the proposal of a brute fact that relates to nothing.
But if appearances have "real" causes, then it stands to reason that there is something that causes people to widely agree on the usefulness of the order/disorder, simple/complex distinction.
I certainly don't think Rawls wants or envisions anything like ABNW. Rather, I think pushing definitions of the good back to the unanalyzable preferences of the individual makes it impossible to state precisely why ABNW is abhorrent. The society there would seem to allow for greater freedom than liberal states today. Virtually all the "manipulation" comes in the form of positive feedback and the environment of one's upbringing. People aren't censored by the state for bucking norms, but rather end up estranged from their community due to their fellow citizens' own preferences for the current order.
The only time explicit government restraint enters the picture is when the characters violently seize soma from other individuals to "free them." But surely the government can step in to stop people from taking other's property. The result isn't even punishment, they are essentially rewarded instead, sent to an environment of like-minded individuals. John Savage wants to leave, and they say "go right ahead."
Point being that virtually all the coercion in born out of the preferences of the individual citizens. To be sure, these preferences are born of their enviornment, one we might call manipulative, but if preferences run the show, I don't see what the objection here is supposed to be.
If a society based on Rawls principles is set up, and over time it evolves into ABNW, where is the objection supposed to come from? That's pretty much the origin story in the book. The advanced economies set about trying to resolve problems, and over time ABNW emerges, not from tyranny, but from bureaucratic, scientific-minded problem solving, economies of scale, and consensus building.
There is another thing that often gets brought up here by right-wing students of post-modernism and identity movements: in virtue of what is the liberal focus on the individual and their freedom legitimate? Why shouldn't we focus on the freedom of communities or ethnic groups to determine how they want to live? To use Nick Land's term, there is no way to "exit" the liberal system, aside from force. A classmate of mine had a similar take, from the far left, claiming that representation should be apportioned on racial lines and there should be parallel justice systems and juries for people of different ethnicities.
Groups on not free to create their own neo-fascist city states and raise the collective above the individual. But what makes the individual the proper arbiter here?
I'd argue that the claims of liberals and collectivist identify movements can't be adjudicated because they each have the origin of the good lying not in reason, which can adjudicate, but in the individual or collective's desires.
We dont have to assume our cognitions are illusory simply because we recognize the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature. This reinstates the Cartesian veil separating appearance from reality, and a correspondence approach to empiricism. We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more truly real than others.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Humanism presupposes objective empiricism and vice versa. Both originate in the Christian( which is indebted to the Platonic) notion of an absolutely certain ground for truth. In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. According to then modern scientific , and humanist, notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself.
Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject as the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the mathematical self-identity of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the objects reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because , more fundamentally, the I equals itself. Once you deconstruct the self-identical unity of the human subject , you simultaneously pull the rug out from under direct and interdict realism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What is the origin and nature of desire within the human being? It has been suggested, in different ways , that desire is a function of biological drives. Freuds libidinal energy and Nietzsches Will to Power are two examples of biological adaptivist approaches to desire. Deleuzes desiring machines is one of the most intriguing ways of navigating between the individual and the social, the reasonable and the affective, the human and the natural. To be more precise, his model of desire abandons the distinction between personal and social, reason and emotion, humanity and nature. Desiring machines are what we are made of, but they are pre-personal. Desiring elements are like nodes in a complex system; they never function alone , but always as an ensemble , out of which subjectivity , the self, the ego, is just a bi-product. Desiring machines are at work everywhere , as much in the world of physics as in the living world. Their functioning accounts for the paradoxical operation of reason, its temporary stabilities as well as its penchant for revolutionary transformation.
Spinoza's 'conatus' or Nietzsche's 'will to power' in different dress; the same old stew, reheated.
Cosmos means 'ordered whole'. That was the vision of the Universe before the scientific revolution. We discussed it before, I mentioned this:
That is the background to the predicament of modernity. How to deal with that, while still keeping fully apprised of the empirical facts, is the principle burden of philosophy today in my view.
Quoting Tom Storm
Isn't the whole concept of scientific or natural law built on the assumption of there being a natural order? I mean, the whole basis of our technologically-ordered culture is predicated on the reliability of scientific predictions. Look at these systems we're using in conducting this conversation, they work quite astonishingly well. How can that not be seen as 'an order'?
Where I see the problem for modern culture is that it is uncomfortable with fact that this order is not something that science explains or accounts for. The nature of the order is a different matter to the fact of there being an order. And 'laws' sound suspiciously anthropomorphic or theistic - 'no laws without a lawgiver', said Nancy Cartwright. It's similar to the argument over the nature of mathematical objects and Platonic realism - they're metaphysical questions, and we don't much like metaphysical questions.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't see any conflict between the 'blind spot' argument and the fact of order. The point of 'the blind spot of science' argument is that we mistake objective knowledge for a kind of transcendent 'God's eye view' of what is real, as if it were true in the absence of any observer whatever - scientism, in a nutshell. Speaking of which, this is from an interview with one of the three authors of the Blind Spot article:
Quoting Adam Frank
But even that will rub a lot of people up the wrong way - 'oh, he's talking about Zen Buddhism, that's a religion, religion is dogmatic, he must be dogmatic.' Well, no. That's another cultural construct. Tangled web.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:100: Maybe because we mistake quantifiable regularities for reality itself.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You! That's the whole idea -- a pluralism of viewpoint is encouraged. See something wrong? Speak up, make your argument. Unless the suggestion is that ABNW would somehow rob people of their ability to notice what's dangerous within their society? It's been years since I read the novel, and perhaps Huxley does suggest this, in order to make his world truly dystopian, but I think that's unrealistic. Remember, the ideal liberal democracy thrives on disagreement, not conformity.
No, the concept of natural law is based on observed invariances.
Sure, but I havent decided that.
Quoting Joshs
Exactly.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not sure about that. There are certainly regularities we are able to ride like surfers riding waves, but natural order and laws seem grandiose and leads to anthropomorphic musings. Chaos and entropy seem even more readily apparent from my perspective. I dont see how we can come to any firm conclusions about the nature of reality.
We have order even in language:
Hence:
[quote=Nietszche]I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.[/quote]
I put it that this raises the question of what a 'meaningful engagement of Being' amounts to. I said we've become distanced from Being because of the illusion of otherness or separation, the sense that we are standing apart from or outside our experience-of-the-world, which in turn is based on the conceptual framework that we view it through:
[quote=ChatGPT;https://chat.openai.com/share/c34d8109-9605-4ef1-9a32-4fcc45b84a2d] Your reflection touches on a profound aspect of Martin Heidegger's philosophy, particularly his critique of the modern age and the technological mindset that, according to him, leads to a form of existential alienation. Heidegger's entire project, starting with "Being and Time" (1927), is an attempt to reawaken the question of Being, which he believed had been neglected since the time of the ancient Greeks. This neglect, in his view, leads to a form of nihilism because it results in a world where things are valued only for their utility, what he calls "the enframing" (Gestell). (e.g. valuing reason only for of its adaptive utility, what use it provides ~ wf.)
Heidegger's engagement with nihilism isn't always direct but can be inferred from his critique of the history of Western metaphysics, which he saw as progressively obscuring our relationship to Being. According to Heidegger, this alienation is not just a matter of mistaken thought but is deeply embedded in the way we interact with the world and each other, particularly through technology, which turns everything, including humans, into resources to be exploited. This condition exacerbates the sense of otherness or separation you mentioned, where we come to view ourselves, others, and the world around us as objects among objects, rather than being integrally connected to the world.
A "meaningful engagement with Being," for Heidegger, involves a fundamental shift in our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. It requires moving away from a conceptual framework that emphasizes separation, utility, and objectification, towards a more original experience of Being. This involves what he calls "thinking," a kind of contemplation that is different from the calculative thinking that dominates the modern world. It's a thinking that dwells on the mystery of Being, that appreciates things in their presence (what he terms "presencing") rather than just their utility.
This shift also entails a different way of relating to the world and others, characterized by what Heidegger calls "care" (Sorge) and "being-with" (Mitsein). Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated subjects confronting an external world, Heidegger encourages us to recognize our fundamental interconnectedness with the world and others (this is where aspects of Heidegger have been compared to the Buddhist principle of dependent origination ~ wf). This recognition can help overcome the alienation and nihilism of the modern condition by fostering a sense of belonging and responsibility for the world.
Your observation about the illusion of otherness ties directly into this Heideggerian critique. The challenge, as Heidegger sees it, is to overcome this illusion not by denying the reality of our individual experiences, but by recognizing that these experiences are always already situated within a world that we share with others. This involves a more profound engagement with the question of Being, one that acknowledges our fundamental interconnectedness and the ways in which our understanding of ourselves and the world is shaped by this interconnectedness.[/quote]
Not sure why we arrived at nihilism in this discussion and I never agued that humans don't find order useful - we are meaning making creatures, from our perspective finding order seems a ready and efficient way to make ideas work for us. But does this transcend our cognitive apparatus? I guess as a form of Platonist you would say, 'yes' (eg, maths as found rather rather than invented).
Grammar varies with languages and one culture's grammar looks like chaos to another's. So if grammar is a faith, it's sectarian and contingent, like that in gods. :wink:
Nothing here about Heidegger suggests he was a theist or a Platonist. Being can be radically contingent and still involve interconnection. Plenty of room for atheism in embodied cognition.
Doesn't Heidegger think that our tendency to conceive of gods and Platonic forms is foundational to nihilism? Being seems to be his way out of all of this.
ChatGPT on Heidegger and nihilsim
@joshs apologies for the above ChatGPT - this is obviously not my area. Any general thoughts on what Heidegger thought of theism or Platonism?
I admit it was a bit of a flight of ideas on my part. But the gist was that the denial of order in the Universe tends towards nihilism, in the sense that it denies the possibility of causal connections and any intrinsic meaning. That is what made me think of Nietszche and Heidegger, as it was among their central themes.
Quoting Tom Storm
Kant distinguishes 'transcendental' from the 'transcendent' where the former concerns the conditions of possibility of knowledge itself, such as space and time as forms of sensibility and the categories of the understanding. But they're still 'givens' inasmuch as they are already present as the constituents of the understanding, so in that sense, beyond or not accessible to conscious awareness. They're 'always already the case'. There are connections between Plato and Kant but it's a rather esoteric topic, but I think it's safe to say that Kant was certainly not nihilistic. I don't think he had encountered that chasm yet.
I don't know why you make the point whether Heidegger was 'theistic', as if I were suggesting that he was, or defending 'theism'. Heidegger's point, like Nietszche's, is not by any stretch to defend religion, but to point out that in its absence, and the collapse of the traditional source of value, we are faced with the prospect of a meaningless cosmos into which we are thrown by chance, and for no real reason, other than the reasons we ourselves can manufacture. All existentialists deal with that question one way or another, although some are theistic and others are not. I don't think Heidegger was theistic although I have read that his philosophical preoccupations were very much shaped by his early theological concerns (he originally studied divinity). Anyway, as I say, a bit of a flight of ideas on my part.
Quoting Tom Storm
Chomsky says not, that there's an underlying 'universal grammar'.
I enjoy such flights of ideas.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, I guess my point is that people tend to tie nihilism to a lack of belief in gods or transcendental entities (antifoundationalism) and as far as I know Heidegger lacked belief in these. So his answer to nihilism seems not to be located in superphysical transcendence, but rather in a form of self-reflection on being, as you suggest. But this is not my subject.
Quoting Wayfarer
Heideggers main target of critique was the subject-object binary that he traces back to Descartes and continues to exert its effect on philosophy through Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. This binary makes possible the metaphysical basis of modern science and technology. According to the modern scientific notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself. Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject to be the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the persistent presence of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the objects reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because, more fundamentally, the I equals itself.
Heidegger traces the modern conception of will, value and causality to the presumed self-identity of the subject as that which posits and represents objects to itself (subject-object relation as propositional assertion S is P). For Heidegger the modern notion of subjectivity is nihilistic because the order (mathematical, objective) it attributes to the Universe is based on a presupposition concerning the certainty of the self as persisting presence. To perceive the self , or objects, in terms of Self-identity, self-persistence, present-at-handness is to distort and flatten meaning, to fail to understand , to fall into nihilism. His notion of Being (or Beyng) as fundamental ontology overcomes the idea of being as persisting presence in favor of Being as occurrence, happening. Being is more primordial than concepts like subject, object, consciousness, willing and valuing. We fall into nihilism whoever we take these as fundamental.
I don't really know how this works either. Didn't we just reinstate the Cartesian veil?
Anyhow, how might this apply to common reality/appearance distinctions? Such as:
"Is economic inequality really increasing, or is it a mirage from statistical choices employed by economists?"
"Is there life on Mars, or are these weird patterns in rock samples caused by abiotic processes?"
"Hey, is that my friend's girlfriend over there making out with that guy?! Or is it just a woman with the same jacket and haircut?" (A classic Seinfeld problem for George when he loses his glasses!)
Such constructions might well be open ended, and inexhaustible, but they aren't unconstrained. Many most really ways of trying to do things run into immediate problems. If you want to patch a tire, there are myriad ways to do it right. Yet, just as certainly there are many more ways to do it wrong (e.g. pouring spaghetti on it, drinking potions, etc.) than ways that will make the tire hold air.
Likewise, there might be many ways to describe something plausibly and consistently (e.g. the nine or so big interpretations of quantum mechanics) but there will also many more ways to describe things in ways that are gibberish or which no one will find plausible. E.g., we might think there are very many ways we could design an airplane, but there are more ways to design airplanes that can't fly than ones that can.
These constraints I think, can usefully be thought of as reality, without losing the insights re intersubjectivity.
We could take Husserl's conception of the "zig-zag" in perception as the phenomenologically basic case of this. "Is this really the case? we can ask, is my interlocutor correct that Yosemite Park is in Wyoming? When we perform this zig-zag we are moving between focusing on the judgment and focusing on things, and through this movement we can see whether the judgment and the state of affairs can be blended with one another. This oscillation is the origin of the kind of truth we call correspondence, but it is not "correspondence truth," in this naive form because it lies below the level of philosophical thought, in the realm of everyday communication.
I'm sort of with you here, but historically it seems like this has led to relativism as often as "absolute grounds for certainty." E.g., arguments along the line of "the individual is the origin point for moral judgement. Individuals disagree about moral judgements. Therefore, moral truth depends on who you are and where you stand." You see a similar move with aesthetic judgement too, "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder."
Yes, but you also pull the rug out on the agent of truth who interacts in the "Human Conversation," writ large, the one who preforms Bernard William's virtues of Sincerity and Accuracy. The ego might be dissolvable, but it must come back on the scene for declarative sentences "I feel that," "I think that," and their central role in human conversation. But moreover, total removals of self ala Hume run into difficulties:
But aren't this inevitable in anything we say?
I don't really see the danger in anthropomorphizing. Human beings are of the world, in the world. Obviously, we make mistakes when we anthropomorphize. Animism is ubiquitous in early cultures and children, "the sky is cloudy because it is sad." But the same faculties that lead to that judgement lead to its rejection.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Our constructions are real. They are of the world. More specifically , they are world-organism interaction, but not in the guise of an interior peering out at an exterior. Constructions are of movements , doings, performances, not passive contemplations of an epistemological nature. To know is to change the world in some fashion and to be affected by the feedback from that change. The cycle of interchanges between our bodies and an environment define what objects are on the basis of what we do with them , and how they respond to our doings. There is no veil here since neither pole of the body-world interaction has a meaning or existence part from the interaction, which remakes each pole in every interchange.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Lets look at a how Husserls zig-zag works. When Husserl talks about a real spatial object, what he means is an idealization. In the case of fixing the tire, we first have to constitute the real object we call the tire. We do this through a progress of objectivating acts that adumbrate perspectival appearances and synthetically correlate these with input from our other senses modalities as well as kinetic information. The object is an idealization founded on the synthesis of these correlated objectivating intentionalacts. Since the object is constituted on the basis of similarities and correlations with respect to prior intentional syntheses, which themselves are build upon earlier commonalities and likenesses, the real world
that we constitute, both in terms of what we recognize within it and what goes wrong, what surprises us, what goes missing or breaks down, what turns out to be illusory, are already prefigured and organized by us around the possibilities of our own bodily performance as zero point of activity. In the zig-zag, when we go back to reflect on the beginning of a process of constitution of the real, this beginning is already framed on the basis of the highest level of constitution we have achieved. As Derrida explains,
In sum, the constraints that are placed on the ways in which we are able to constitute the real via objectivating intentional acts arise out of an outside whose alterity is never completely foreign to the nature of the subjects bodily functioning.
The problem is that liberalism presents a faux neutrality. To say, for example, that hate speech is permitted but assault is not, is to lapse into non-neutrality. What liberals do is highlight all the ways that liberalism is tolerant and paper over all the ways that it is not, and then announce that they are neutral and uniformly tolerant.
What is needed is a criterion by which the state acts, such that hate speech is permissible and assault is not. Liberalism is incoherent because it claims to be value-neutral, and yet there is no way to distinguish hate speech from assault given value neutrality. One could appeal to the proximate regime (modern liberal democracy) or the remote regime (democracy), but the mere appeal to a regime without a justification of the regime is a petitio principii, and this is precisely Rawls' error. It is a stretch for @Count Timothy von Icarus to call it an individual preference, because it is rather a cultural or societal preference, but both are in the same ballpark.
Quoting J
But only at the private level.
Quoting J
But only at the private level.
Whenever someone's arguments oppose Rawls' vision, then they are by definition not allowed to prevail. Liberalism is a two-tiered scheme, where everyone is allowed freedom within the set boundaries, and no one quite knows why the boundaries are what they are.
Granted, "liberalism" in the older, non-Rawlsian sense derives from thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, and they were more willing to try to defend the regime than Rawls was. Rawls is like a politician who sums up and sets forth the values of a people. He does not attempt to justify those values.
I'm sure that's part of it, but I think it's only one piece of the puzzle. For candidates on the right, he did extended interviews with DeSantis, Christie, and Ramaswamy, but they have all dropped and I know he is not a fan of Biden. It would be interesting to know whether he extended an invitation to Trump. In any case, I haven't been following politics very closely so I will leave it at that, especially for this thread.
Makes perfect sense to me. I do see a convergence between Heidegger and elements of non-dualism, although of course there are also many differences.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right - as I was saying up-thread, the advent of liberal individualism, the individual ego as arbiter of truth.
[quote] It is in any case clear that for both Nozick and Rawls a society is composed of individuals, each with his or her own interest, who then have to come together and formulate common rules of life . In Nozick's case there is the additional negative constraint of a set of basic rights. In Rawls's case the only constraints are those that a prudent rationality would impose. Individuals are thus in both accounts primary and society secondary, and the identification of individual interests is prior to, and independent of, the construction of any moral or social bonds between them. But we have already seen that the notion of desert is at home only in the context of a community whose primary bond is a shared understanding both of the good for man and of the good of that community and where individuals identify their primary interests with reference to those goods. Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. Only those goods
in which everyone, whatever their view of the good life, takes an interest are to be admitted to consideration. In Nozick's argument too, the concept of community required for the notion of desert to have application is simply absent. [/Quote]
MacIntyre goes on to describe how members of the laity who might sympathize variously with Nozick (conservative) or Rawls (liberal) would put things slightly differently. In general, these people will talk about deserts, what people "deserve," given good action. Thus the conservative will talk about how they worked hard for their income and deserve to reap the rewards of it, to use the fruits of their labor to buy their parents a house, etc. The liberal will talk about how the inherited wealth of economic elites is underserved, or how the hard working but impoverished laborers deserve a higher standard of living.
Desert is missing from the more sophisticated theories because it is assumed that "what is good for man," man's telos, and "what the virtues consist in," is unknowable. MacIntyre's point is a different one but it ties in to the problem we are discussing. It is because man's telos and the nature of virtue is unanalyzable that desert, a natural part of naive conceptions ethics, ends up missing from the picture.
The risk when just deserts leaves the picture is most acute when it comes to criminal justice. There, when we cease to focus on what is deserved, and instead only focus on the pragmatics of recidivism and incentives, we risk falling into a conception of the justice system as largely a tool for properly training people to behave in accordance with the law, the way we might "train" a horse.
The training of people, the 'civilizing' of them. although obviously more complex, is essentially no different than training horses. some people, like some horses, train better than others,
I think anthropomorphising is lazy and onanistic. And worse, it is often wrong. But it's too minor a problem to debate. :wink:
I fail to see how it has ever been anything but this. We may dress up our individual egos in drag with Islam or liberalism or existentialism, but in the end we are emotionally driven creatures who make choices based on what (we think) pleases us and how we as individuals interpret ideas.
Quoting Leontiskos
I've never known any liberals to say this. Can you provide an example?
Au contraire, metaphysics being onanistic is a central point of contention re misology. That's where claims about the limits of reason started the inability of speculation not to be led by mere passion and appetite in the end. The "Masters of Suspicion," Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, etc. get the ball rolling on that. It's just that it takes a long time for similar sorts of arguments to start getting made about "the things we know well," i.e., human relations: gender relations, race relations, inequality, justice, etc. But the skepticism re reason starts with "the external world," with the British empiricists (or arguably with medieval nominalism and Protestant fideism re God).
They are similar because how we learn is similar, and because the proximate goals of "reinforcing x behavior," are similar.
I'd argue that they can't be the same thing. When we train animals, a behavior, or lack of it, is the end itself. The Aristotlean distinction between continence and virtue makes no sense with animals. But with people, we want them to want what is good Frankfurt's second order volitions and we want to convince them that it is good to act in this way.
The difference is that the person and their excellence, excellence in our eyes and theirs, is an end in itself. We want people to be free, and in being free they must understand why they act and accept it "with the rational part of the soul." A merely continent person is always unstable, and in a way, unfree. They want to act in vice and are at war with themselves (Romans 7). But education aims at the enhancement of freedom and harmonization of the person, giving them the tools to harmonize themselves. Training only focuses on the ends of behavior.
But without a conception of the human good, virtue, and freedom, education and training for human beings degenerates into the sort of thing we do for animals.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Im reminded of the reason that positivism, in the form of stimulus-response theory, came to dominate psychology. It was meant to counter the idealist atomisms of armchair psychologists. Only what was observable and measurable counted for the behaviorists. Eventually, after finally circling back to William James, it became clear that behaviorisms understanding of objectivity relied on hidden metaphysical assumptions. Cognitivism sought to remedy behaviorisms blind spot for the irreducibly interpretive elements of meaning, but came under fire themselves for being disembodied, and ignoring the body , the social, and the intrinsically normative, goal-oriented nature of human and animal behavior.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It seems to me the development of psychological theory from logical atomism to behaviorist understanding of human and animal behavior to psychoanalysis and cognitivism , and finally embodied enactivism, has taken the field farther and farther away from non-naturalistic, non-evolution and ecology-based models of the good, the virtuous and the autonomous.
For example, look at the post written a few hours before yours, where MacIntyre is being quoted:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life.
Quoting Leontiskos
Might we say that, particularly for post-Marxist positions, there is a teleologically oriented notion of the good life that is process (dialectical materialism) rather than content-based?
This is embedded into the educational system itself.
People go to school both to change and yet to remain who they are.
The educational system is supposed to teach people criticial thinking, yet, for all practical intents and purposes, people in the system (both the teachers as well as the students), know that the argument from power is the strongest argument. And then we're all supposed to pretend that this ain't so ...
What else can a student conclude, when he bears in mind that the point of taking courses is to pass the exams, and this means answering exam questions in such a way that will most likely bring good grades, criticial thinking be damned.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think this is pluralism and it sounds pretty decent to me. But I don't know any cultures that allow this where it might get in the way of capitalism or the dominant power and ideology of a country. The safety of others is also a consideration for the most part.
As expressed in the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness. But this does not mean, do whatever you think makes you happy. In his recent book constitutional scholar Jeffery Rosen argues that the term as used by the Founders traces back before the philosophers of Liberalism to the classical philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero. The pursuit of happiness is deliberative and public minded. It is not self interested but a matter of the 'common good' and 'general welfare'.
I wasn't referring to metaphysics. I was referring to the human urge to anthropomorphise such things as nature, animals and objects. I think this tendency to project ourselves onto everything around us like this is not entirely healthy - but I thought this point was too trivial to debate in this thread.
Might that sentiment not be more accurate if expressed in the first-person singular? It's very much a projection of the liberal bourgouis consciousness, I think.
I recall when I encountered the teachings of Advaita Vedanta in my youth, much was made about the falsehood of egoic consciousness, and that this is what has to be seen through or overcome - 'cut off at the root', was the expression, which was distinguished from the effort to 'prune' it through some attempt at self-discipline. I was to realise later that the Chinese Communist Party, for example, also deprecates the individual, with generally malign consequences, and that individual freedom is in fact a vitally important principle of liberal culture, and something also often violated in theocratic cultures, such as Iran. (Accordingly, I continue to believe in the sovereignty of the individual, although I also recognise there's a fundamental difference between philosophical self-abnegation and such politically-coerced conformism.)
In any case, the principle of transcending egoic consciousness is fundamental to many faith traditions. It doesn't even have to be particularly religious - it characterises anyone who is selflessly devoted - but that is where it is generally spelled out. 'Not my will, but thine', is a characteristic expression. (Although I have a rather interesting philosophical text, Surviving Death, Mark Johnston, who claims to demonstrate a thoroughly naturalistic (as distinct from supernatural) account of the idea of a 'higher self'.)
I think this is a very idealistic view of education. It doesn't accord at all with my experience of the education system, at least at the primary and secondary levels. The tertiary, as I have experiebced it, has some of the virtues your idealistic vision sees.
I don't disagree with your assessment at all. Perhaps I should have said "ideally" lol.
I do. We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. When a 4th grader is taught math, or is taught the golden rule, or is taught to think before they act, or is taught to recognize when they are angry and count to ten, they are being educated in the form you indicated. But in fact it is the parents who are primarily responsible for education in this deeper sense of civilizing the child and teaching them how to be human.
Quoting Leontiskos
We shouldnt train horses the way we train horses either. Now that we understand that other animals are cognitive, emotive creatures that construct their worlds on the basis of goal-oriented norms, we can jettison mechanistic behaviorist ways of thinking about non-human animals, and perhaps also move beyond Aristotles animal rationale distinction between homo sapiens and other species. We are beginning to learn that moral thinking does not start with humans. For instance, the sense of justice has been studied in the wild.
What separates civilizing, rationalizing education from indoctrination? Are we not teaching children as we teach horses, with one distinction being that in the case of the horse we assume there is no rational cognition mediating between the stimulus and the reinforcement?
In fact, if conceptions of the good and virtuous life are assumed to be non-relative, we bypass environmental contingencies and reinforcers in favor of innate, a priori givens. We teach the golden rule and how to count to ten when one is angry, not recognizing the contradiction between indoctrinating students with a recipe for blameful anger against violators of such a rule, and teaching techniques for moderating tempers which we train to be fired up in the face of transgressions against the golden rule.
Quoting Wayfarer
Varela and Thompson, in their book The Embdied Mind, made their way from empirically demonstrating a groundless self to emphasizing the beneficial ethical implications of the decentering of the Cartesian subject. They assert that a thoroughgoing understanding of the groundlessness of personhood reveals the mutual co-determination of subject and world. This realization can in turn lead, through the use of contemplative practice of mindfulness, to the awareness of universal empathy, compassion and benevolence.
In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.(Thompson)
But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence. The basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply relational co-determinacy, but the experience of motivated, desiring CHANGE in relational co-determinacy. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, every moment of return to the thinking of totality conjures a different affect and a slightly different motivated meaning of the whole. Feelings of compassion and benevolence belong to an infinite spectrum of always changing affectivities of positive and negative valence. Phenomenal awareness as transition from one kind of relational unity to another can just as well be malevolent as benevolent. Within the range of kinds of relationality, a particular phenomenal awareness may be a lessening of compassion or a strengthening of it. We can not say it is always benevolent, only that it is always a new sense of the correlational, that it is never without co-determinacy. Becoming is the restless anxiety of desire, striving, motivation, and the ground of all affect and valuation.
This is simply confused. Horses are not humans, nor do they approximate humans. Sorry.
Buddha nature is inherently blissful. Part of enlightenment (bearing in mind, 'enlightenment' was coined by an English translator for the Buddhist term 'bodhi', which in many contexts is translated as 'wisdom') is realising that, which is why it's salvific. It is a fountainhead of ecstacy.
Quoting Joshs
But Buddhism, along with the other sapiential traditions, is about breaking through to a different form of awareness altogether. I don't think you'll find it in phenomenology or existentialism although there may be hints of it at various places. There's some references to it amongst the German idealists (Schopenhauer's 'better consciousness', Fichte's 'higher consciousness'). But it will usually be categorised with religion by many, to their detriment. This is where the insights of non-dualism are especially relevant.
A footnote: in my view, modern Western culture tends to idolise 'the natural' as a symbol of purity. Accordingly, we want to situate humans on the continuum with other animals, as part of nature or a product of nature. Hence also the romanticizing of first-nations people and traditional culture. It is then seen as 'arrogance' to declare that humans are different from other species to which we are purportedly related by evolution. We long for a kind of re-union with nature, which might actually be a sublimated spiritual longing. But in this context, 'nature' has been substituted for 'the unconditioned', an insight into which has been generally lost to modern philosophical discourse.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Joshs
There are both good and bad horse trainers, just as there are good and bad educators of humans.
Awhile back I downloaded a video from Vervaeke to try to acquaint myself with him, and tonight I finally got around to watching the first hour. It turns out that the discussion is on this same book, although their conversation also relates to your thread on logic:
(At 52:00 he reads a footnote that addresses objection.)
Interesting. So the idea is that the essential nature of being is beneficial towards all things?
Isn't this missing the point of the example? I think @joshs observation seems relevant. As humans develop our moral understanding and ethics, the sphere of concern widens. Which reflects the broader idea that moral agents should take into account the well-being and interests of all beings affected by their actions, not just humans. Which also underpins discussions on topics such as animal rights, environmental ethics, and bioethics - but that is moving on into new subjects.
Quoting Tom Storm
Deep idea: It is the pleroma, the divine fullness, or the principle of plenitude. That is the intuitive wonder at the amazing fecundity of nature, the ever-abundant horn of plenty which gives rise to endless forms most wondrous, such that everything that can be, must be. It is contrasted with the intuition that existence is a bane or intrinsically distressing due to the transience of all phenomena - all that is born will perish, But I think the middle way is that being (not necessarily the same as existence) is an overall good - where suffering arises is the attachment to the transitory, to the products of that beneficence, whereas the sage seeks to return to its source, that which gives rise to the All, but is not itself the all (per Plotinus).
Yeah, it's good stuff. Truth always limps without beauty, poise, and form, and Vervaeke manifests a remarkable beauty and poise when he engages his topics. I think Jordan Peterson does a relatively good job at this popular level, but his temptation is falling into polemics and pugilism (and, in my opinion, too much Jung and too little Plato). Vervaeke has a remarkable balance, and refuses to get pulled in too many different practical directions. In my opinion Plato is the summit of human reason, and Vervaeke actually tries to expound the depths of Plato at a popular level, which is admirable and profound while also being a bit naive. I will definitely keep an eye on him. He seems to be an important voice.
It's actually pretty interesting how these psychologists are making waves. Peterson takes a first-order approach to the Bible and Vervaeke takes a first-order approach to Plato. Formal scholars of the Bible and Plato are not doing this, and I think there is a general hunger for it.
Quoting Leontiskos
I am reminded of Richard Rortys remark about relativism:
I don't think everything that might be labeled "relativism," would fall prey to the problems of misology. Schindler is talking about a particular sort of relativism that denies the ability of reason to make judgements vis-á-vis what is declared relative. It is in this that it becomes absolutizing. Relational explanations, those where perspective is essential, notions of concepts as unfolding historically (e.g. Hegel) might be called "relativistic" in some sense, but they are not blocking off their subject matter from the purview of reason.
So to, eliminitivist and reductive paths to some varieties of relativism don't deny the purview of reason. Rather, they claim that reason reveals that some phenomena fall fully on the appearance side of the reality/appearance distinction, and are [I]explained/have their reasons in[/I] something else. This variety of relativism isn't even a true relativism IMO.
I don't think Rorty generally falls into this trap, although he might come close in the ways he sometimes describes Wittgenstein's PI as seemingly absolutely decisive re questions of how "language can hitch to the world." In sections of Philosophy as Cultural Politics, he sometimes seems to get dangerously close to absolutizing clefts in being, fully excising parts from the whole, in a way I don't think is helpful or warranted, even by his own standards. But from this one cleft, a lot seems to follow, like the arguments for eliminitivism and against "objective reality." I think Brandom has a decent critique of these, but it misses the main point IMO, which is the rush to dispense with fairly essential elements of human experience because some prior, absolutized cleft in being appears to make them impossible to account for.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
How would universal reason, or even Rortys conversation of mankind, adjudicate the following differends (to use Lyotards term for the inability of the established terms of discourse to recognize a claim made by the victim)?
Presumably, if some group rejects the terms of their labor contract, or a peace treaty, they have reasons for doing so. E.g., China doesn't maintain that it has claims on Russian-controlled land in the Far-East because they have their own incommensurate "Chinese way of declaring national boundaries." They claim they are the legitimate owners of those lands for various reasons: because they were ceded under duress, because the native inhabitants of those lands are culturally closer to China than Russia, and because they have a historical-traditional role as governors of that land, etc.
Further, people have "their reasons" for their views as they understand them, but there are also metaphysical reasons for these reasons if they are not to be simply "uncaused."
All this seems fathomable. Different cultural views do not spring forth into the world uncaused and undetermined.
Nor is it impossible for a Marxist worker to become a conservative libertarian or vice versa, or for chauvinists to embrace third wave feminist eventually. But if this is the case, it is not impossible for reason to transcend these boundaries. Someone raised as a Lutheran is not locked inside a box, forever unable to fathom Catholicism, let alone Zen Buddhism. The Doctrine of Transcendentals itself could pass from its embryonic form in the mind of pagan, Greek Aristotle through Islamic thought, to medieval Latin Christianity precisely because it could transcend Greek, Islamic, or Latin terms of discourse. This is reasons transcendence at work.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I would argue that the Doctrine of Transcendentals was transmitted up to the current philosophical milieu , as were Platos forms , Descartes Cogito and Kants transcendental subjectivity, along the way having their sense transformed continually. I think if Aristotle were re-animated and brought to the present time, he would disappoint many of his modern followers by siding with the most traditionalistic ethical elements of our culture. His thinking was a bit ahead of his time, and well behind our time. His thinking is separated from ours by all of the philosophies that followed one another in the intervening historical development, each critiquing the previous eras limitations and pointing to new possibilities. There is no idea of Aristotles , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history. Development of ideas is a contingent movement, not a logical one.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Reasons are caused within an interplay of reciprocal causality and reciprocal interaffecting, in the way the structure and function of an organism is caused by the selective pressures of a reciprocally causal ecological system. The function and aim of reason ( and metaphysics), just as the function of a hand or an eye, is not settled in advance, but arises alongside the emerging phenomenon. This is a non-linear rather than linear notion of causality. The rules are changed by the feedback from their consequences. One cannot attain an alien cultures reasons without first understanding the worldview within which these reasons are intelligible. In order to understand their worldview, we cannot simply draw from some already established metaphysics, since a metaphysics amounts to a worldview There is no way to align multiple, incommensurable worldviews on the basis of a universal notion of reason grounded in a universal metaphysics. One has to be willing to alter ones own worldview and metaphysical basis of reason in order to achieve dialogue with another perspective.
Right, and this would be the work of reason, transcending current beliefs and horizons. But we need not stop at Gadamer's "fusion of horizons." Since we "cannot forget ourselves," it seems to follow that we should remember ourselves in our understanding (essentially, Hegel's point re Spirit knowing itself in the shape of Spirit).
I'd argue it's at least both. Clearly, Plato identified problems in his own work, as did Kant. In both cases, successors took up these seeming contradictions, carrying them forward in an attempt to resolve them. The directions they chose to go with them weren't fully contingent, they were shaped by contradictions inherit in the source material. When Fichte picks up on a tension in Kant, he is picking up on a problem Kant himself recognized as not fully resolved. When Calvin picks up Augustine, he is dealing with contradictions inherit in Augustine's ideas of divine sovereignty and the freedom of the will.
Would I go as far as Hegel and say the move is only a logical one? I think it depends on your frame of reference. Because Hegel certainly allows for what might be considered contingency, it's just that the essence of the evolution of notions is grounded in logic.
You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself. What grounds meaning is neither the identical nor the unconnected, neither causality nor chaos, but the motivated, the relevant, the consistent. History, change, negation, difference; none of these can be understood if they are subordinated to a platonism of the absolute, the total, the identical.
Quoting Joshs
It doesn't; it's a doctrinal claim in those schools of Buddhism that contain the concept of "Buddha nature" (or the modernized equivalent of it).
(I've replied to you about this before, but it looks like you've ignored it.)
That said, compassion and benevolence have a very specific meaning in Buddhist discourse, insofar they are understood in terms of the Four Brahmaviharas, the Four Sublime Abidings. As such, they aren't simply thought of as the emotions or attitudes that people generally think they are. Further, their definitions vary, depending on the Buddhist school.
No, I don't think so. I thought you were saying they were unconnected because your response to "people can learn to communicate ideas across cultures and transcend current boundaries" seemed to be negative - that the ideas changing would imply there was no real communication.
But if we're in agreement that there is meaningful communication there, then I don't see how different cultures are a barrier that reason can't transcend, or an area where reason fails to apply.
The truly groundless is not defined by anything else. To hate something else is to stand in a relation to it where you are defined by what you hate. To be merely indifferent to something is still to be defined by something, for its boundaries are the limit of your being and interest. Only an attitude of love, the identification of the self in the other, avoids this limitation, allowing for what is truly unconditioned.
I've generally seen this explanation more in reference to Christian, Platonist, and Hindu thinkers, but I am fairly sure some Buddhists were mentioned as well. For example, indifference runs counter to henosis because it still acknowledges multiplicity in the objects of indifference that lie "over there," as it were.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Im all in favor of reason. But if by reason you mean the consulting of criteria and rules of reasonableness that exist prior to and outside of the actual, contextually unfolding situation in which they are being used, without that context modifying the sense of those criteria and rules, then this is a non-starter for me. As the later Wittgenstein argues, there is nothing in a rule that tells us whether we are following it correctly. In every situation where reason is involved, agreeing on what is the case is always accompanied by a redetermination of what is at stake and at issue in the interchange. That is to say, a paradoxical element of unreason belongs to the very heart of reason.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Since when does love have priority over any other affectivity? One can only identify the self in the other if the other is already recognizable in some fashion. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage as nodes within a larger relational matrix (first order morality). We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy a sense of subjection. We always have intended to welcome, sacrifice ourselves for the intelligible Other, and always disliked, `chose against' the incommensurate Other. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not.
Steven T. Katz argues for a constructivist approach, suggesting that mystical experiences are heavily influenced by the individual's cultural, linguistic, and religious background. According to Katz, the interpretive frameworks and conceptual categories that a person has internalized from their culture shape the nature of their mystical experiences. This view implies that there is no "pure" mystical experience independent of the conceptual apparatus brought by the mystic to the experience.
On the other hand, Robert K.C. Forman advocates for the perennialist approach, positing that there are core realisations that are universal and not entirely shaped by cultural or linguistic conventions. Forman argues that some aspects of mystical experiences transcend cultural and religious boundaries, suggesting the existence of a common realisation that can be accessed by individuals independently of their specific religious or cultural backgrounds.
I see @Count Timothy von Icarus as favouring the Forman approach and @Joshs as advocating the latter. I favour the former approach, in that I believe that at least some elements of what is being described as mystical experience (granting that it is rather a problematic description) are as universal as the experience of breathing or having sex. Religions and philosophies vary culturally, but hearts and lungs are the same everywhere.
But it's futile to really try and isolate or identify what that common core or 'mystical experience' is, because insofar as anything whatever is said about it will be expressed in language and its related metaphorical and cognitive structures. I believe that the 'philosophers of the absolute', of whom I suppose that Hegel is arguably one, would be aware of that, but I wouldn't look for agreement in the milieu that Joshs typically appeals to.
I think the key term is 'the unconditioned', and accordingly did a search on 'the unconditioned in philosophy'. I found one article called The Unconditioned in Philosophy of Religion - read it a couple of times and didn't get much from it, but at least it frames the debate the right way. A better one was The Unconditioned Soul by Stephen Priest, a book excerpt. But I know the objection will often be that all consideration of a putative 'unconditioned' is characterised by post-modernists as religious dogma, which counts against it.
Well, you have to consider the framing here. Plato, for instance, lays this view out in the Timaeus as the goal of "becoming like God," and this would become even more central for later Christians like Augustine or Sufis like Rumi. Nothing that is intelligible is unintelligible for God, and henosis itself implies an accent to the height of intelligibility already. Consider where intelligibility is coming from in the first place in Neoplatonism, or where Maya is coming from in Shankara.
Strictly speaking, there isn't an other who can oppress God; God is fully self-determining. E.g., [I]"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it. [/I]
I don't disagree with:
And I think it can be generalized to all sorts of experiences. I simply disagree that this difference cannot be transcended, that someone raised in an Orthodox society is unable to ever understand Islam, or that someone raised as a secular atheist will never grasp the intelligibility of Hinduism. This does not seem to be the case. Converts exist, and "a convert's zeal" is a common expression for a reason.
Moreover, I don't see why broad identity groups would be the defining line here. You could as well make the same sort of case for people from different families not understanding each other or individuals being unable to understand one another.
But if people can understand each other, I see no reason to understand this as people learning "Arab Reason," "Hindu Reason," or "Jewish Reason," through some sort of non-rational process so that they can then communicate. It would seem to be more the case that people learn these different contexts of reason through reason.
Nor are the conditions of each groups "reason" sui generis and primitive. There are commonalities across them. Where do you tend to see male-led households and polygamy? In resource scarce, less centralized societies where conflict is common "warrior cultures" which result in a high ratio of adult women to adult men. Which is to say, the differences between groups themselves aren't arbitrary and unanalyzable either. You can certainly make a lot of mistakes generalizing the "those who work/those who pray/those who fight," categories across Medieval Europe and India, but there are also obvious commonalities, e.g. that "those who work," is always the largest group, from Egypt to India to Europe, because of the physical realities of the amount of labor hours agriculture requires without access to modern technology, or that "those who fight," are always going to have a significant advantage in getting their way.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There are many different systems of reason, perfectly logical within themselves, but no overarching way to arbitrate between different systems of rationality.
Sounds like a pretty serious problem for an interpretation of Wittgenstein to have.
Is this supposed to be a communitarian interpretation of Wittgenstein ala Kirpke? IMO, these have seriously problems with plausibility, both as theories of meaning and as supposedly representing Wittgenstein's own view. But if you take a non-communitarian view, this sort of issue doesn't just exist across cultural lines, but potentially for communication between any individuals. And yet philosophy presupposes they such communication is possible.
Indeed, consider Wittgenstein's example re persuasion. IIRC, the king who has been told the world was created when he was born fifty years ago isn't described as being from some radically different culture or speaking a different language. His difference with Wittgenstein lies precisely in his having been told the world was created at his birth, making the problem individually situated.
But Wittgenstein doesn't describe a process whereby any such disconnects must be solved by some sort of purely affective maneuver. What the case highlights is the way justification hangs together, not that justification is some sort of unanalyzable primitive. Rather, PI basically sidesteps and ignores the issues of how practices arise. Yet presumably they do not spring from the ether uncaused, nor are their causes unknowable. Wittgenstein even provides a narrative of [I]the reasons[/I] that the king holds this belief.
The claim that reason [I]can[/I] transcend such differences is not the same as saying it always does. That people can reject discourse is obvious. So to is the fact that people can be convinced of things in ways unrelated to reason. A key point made by Plato is that people are generally [I]not[/I] ruled over by the rational part of the soul. Nor is the claim that human rationality is bound up in language and practice equivalent with the claim that rationality as such is wholly [I]reducible[/I] to "language-games." For example, Kant's reason, which sits prior to perception, is clearly not the type of thing to be defined in terms of language.
Getting stuck inside the box of language is quite akin to getting stuck inside the box of "mental representations," and I don't know how advocates of our being stuck in either box justify the one over the other. It seems like the same mistake in either case, mistaking the means through which something is grasped for the thing that is grasped. E.g., "we cannot drive a car, we can only push pedals and turn steering wheels; we do not experience the world we can only experience ideas; we do not exercise reason, we can only participate in language-games."
But consider someone raised on intuitionist mathematics, who has always taken it as gospel that proof by contradiction and non-constructive proofs are bad inference, illegitimate. It seems totally possible for this person to come to embrace a Platonist or formalist view of mathematics, perhaps for reasons related to emotion (they get married to a formalist, it is good for their career, etc.). But it seems completely implausible that reason plays no role in this jump between heterogeneous systems.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What youre seeing here is a particular kind of theological interpretation of Wittgenstein. Braver, like contemporary religious thinkers such as Caputo and Critchley, read Wittgenstein through Kierkegaard and Levinas. They believe that in order to rescue god from idolatry, we must not allow empirical fact to become captured within presuppositions concerning the nature of ontology or reason.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The irony here is that Bravers reading of Wittgenstein is meant to protect true novelty from being dissolved into subjective schemes of language. He is unhappy with my claim that we can never be truly surprised by anything.
His aim would seem to be in accord with your desire to keep the real a radically surprising phenomenon. But he believes this aim is compromised by dictating the terms of what counts as real and true by sneaking into the real a series of assumptions, as Kant does, which claim to be universal and outside of history but are instead a contingent product of a particular historical era.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Its not a private situation , but an intersubjective one. We are brought up into, or inherit, our practices, because they are language games, not solipsistic opinions. why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? As far as the role of justification and reason with respect to the kings belief, Witt says
So how do practices arise? The same way that Kuhn tells us paradigms arise. Via a gestalt shift. We turn the picture upside down, change its sense. This is a different notion of causation than that of empirical reason.
Isn't that the very point of contention re Kirpkestein, that it seems obvious that Robinson Cursoe [I]can[/I] develop practices off on his island?
It seems to me that Kirpke ends up in the position of denying that things that obviously happen actually happen, or allowing that people can indeed create private practices, but that for some reason these must be considered "practice-like behaviors." Except that it is more acute than that, for he seems in a position where it is impossible for him to explain why someone might ever decide they have performed a private practice incorrectly, IMO, a very effective point against Kirpkestein.
Yes, and we also modify those practices for various reasons and create practices for specific purposes. I don't see how practices then can be identical with reason, at least not sui generis forms of reason, for then it would never make sense for us to go about changing the rules of games because they fail to achieve what they were created for. But this sort of thing happens all the time.
Sometimes. Naismith came up with basketball for the practical purpose of keeping athletes active during the winter. Spencer Brown's system in "The Laws of Form," might have been a paradigm shift, but it was a private one until he released it. Lots of changes in practices are iterative. But the very fact that people make iterative changes to practices based on what they think is bad about the rules, or can think that "the rules are wrong," shows that such rules can't be the ground for reason.
I don't even think Wittgenstein thought reason was locked into separate reasons (plural) that can't communicate, his point is on how justifications hang together. Reason is the ground for rule following. Kant puts it before perception in the First Critique. Plato locates it out "in the world" in the Philebus. Hegel locates it as the engine of all being in the Logics. I see better arguments for the expansive view than the deflationary one.
This is just one example of the way that Joshs consistently approaches reality, namely through a kind of relativism. I have been reading Thomas Nagel's The Last Word which is a good refutation of this general approach. As someone interested in ancient philosophy, I am a bit curious as to how modern philosophy got itself so mixed up, but I am glad to see that folks like Nagel can see beyond their cultural context.
As to the plight of contemporary philosophy, I have benefitted greatly from one of the first books I read when I started posting on forums, The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie. There's a useful abstract here which also contains links to other reviews. (I suppose Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is of a similar ilk.) But then, I started reading philosophy as part of a youthful quest for enlightenment, my overall approach is more influenced by theosophy (small t, I was never a member of the Society) than philosophy proper. The main historical narrative that I'm following are the reasons behind the philosophical ascendancy of scientific materialism. I find *some* convergence with themes in postmodern philosophy, but I'm not well read in it, or in modern philosophy generally - my undergraduate honours were in comparative religion.
Interesting! I was looking at another of his books which is on a similar topic, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament. I am looking forward to that chapter. I think Nagel's project in The Last Word is important and pertinent to our age.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks for the link. I have enjoyed some essays by Owen Barfield, who was a theosophist. Granted, his theosophy is often downplayed and I don't know a great deal about that movement.
(Technically, I think Barfield was an 'anthroposophist', a follower of Rudolf Steiner, who broke with the Theosophical Society. I have his Saving the Appearances in my pile of unread books ;-) )
Interestingly enough, the book that kicked this thread off makes a case for a certain type of relativism. Plato's Good falls into the category of "things that are good for the sake of something else and good in themselves," a category Aristotle lacks, but which Augustine recovers. These basically map to "relative good," and "absolute good." There is a perspectivism at work in the love of the good. Plato uses downright erotic language to describe knowledge, and romance is deeply personal and subjective (at one point he seems to suggest having intercourse with the Good, which gets close to the eros between husband/God and the bride/soul/Israel/Church in the Song of Songs, the apex of Hebrew wisdom literature).
However, the whole point of the images in the middle of the Republic is that there is no true division in the relative or absolute. The divided line is still one whole line. The philosopher king goes back into the cave because he must recover the whole, the appearances with the in itself in order to have the absolute. Appearance and reality are not mutually exclusive alternatives as Parmenides would have it in the Parmenides. The absolute, by definition, includes the relative. Relative appearance is not reality, but the reality of a thing must include all its appearances. The reality/appearance dichotomy isn't dyadic then, but rather appearance is a subcategory of reality. Nor is the modern positivist's "objectivity" the absolute, but rather, sitting in intersubjective space, it is a certain type of appearance.
The relative then is always a part of the whole, not divorced from it. This is why relativism in Augustine's semiotics (even if object and sign are the same, the interpretant will vary) or in Boethius' conception of human vs divine knowing do not collapse into sophistic power struggles and a bad sort of relativism. Such relativism is still a part of whole to which reason applies due to the fact that reason is transcendent and ecstatic.
Incidentally, I would not have found Nagel's book very interesting if I hadn't first been exposed to the popular philosophies on this forum. The errors he is trying to address seem rampant, such as those related to language, science, ethics, and religion. More generally, there is the error of allowing what Nagel calls "first-order reasoning" to be eclipsed.
I can vouch for that. :smile:
I was joking.
All of the comments you direct towards me are respectful and on point.
:starstruck: